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Your Evening Briefing
(Bloomberg) --
U.S. health regulators approved a faster coronavirus test that may help speed efforts to contain the pathogen’s spread across the country. This comes as President Donald Trump, after being pilloried for statements downplaying the threat, government delays in distributing working tests and an Oval Office speech that helped ring in a new bear market, formally declared a national emergency. His potential successors, Senator Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden, have their own coronavirus plans. They debate each other on Sunday.
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Here are today’s top stories
In doing so, Trump enabled the federal government to marshal additional resources to combat the virus. Stocks leaped on the news, though not as much as they fell Thursday.
Meanwhile over in the U.K., the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson is under fire for a coronavirus plan that includes less-than-diplomatic references to herd immunity and expected fatalities.
Oil prices, crushed by a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, jumped late Friday after Trump said the U.S. would fill its strategic petroleum reserve.
Governments and central banks are rolling out measures meant to cushion their economies from a possible global recession. They may be too late.
Delta Air Lines slashed flights and spending while seeking government aid to contend with demand shock caused by the outbreak.
Venture capitalists poured $42 billion into drug development over the past three years, with almost half going to rare diseases with expensive cures. Only 5% went to drugs that prevent infections.
Bloomberg Businessweek Special Report, The Lost Year: A cure for the new coronavirus will depends on a rare kind of lab mouse. But there just aren’t enough.
What you’ll need to know tomorrow
- Charting the Economy: Central banks tremble as markets crash.
- What Italy’s coronavirus nightmare looks like on the ground.
- Drive-through virus testing so popular they had to shut it down.
- But Trump likes the concept so much he’s starting a website.
- Denmark has shut down its borders to stymie spread of Covid-19.
- China, like a Republican senator, has a Covid-19 conspiracy theory.
- Mapping the spread of the coronavirus worldwide and in the U.S.
What you’ll want to read tonight
Another way the working class loses: About 70% of America’s workers don’t have the luxury of working from home, including people like bank tellers, factory workers and those who labor in such industries as waste hauling, retail and health care. These 100 million people are likely to be the last ones still at work as their white-collar colleagues set up shop in home offices or at kitchen tables, avoiding strangers who might just give them the new coronavirus.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Petri at jpetri4@bloomberg.net
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