World coronavirus dispatch: Rethinking stock investments during Covid-19

The US IPO market has reopened and more and more companies are letting employees work from home for a long period of time

The US IPO market has reopened, in another sign of the world forcing itself to return to normal. A burst of US stock market listings is expected in coming months after coronavirus forced a pause in new launches. Some companies whose listings have been hotly anticipated, such as Airbnb, have obtained the funds they need through rounds of private funding. That could soon change. Read more here  

Let’s look at the global statistics:

Total Confirmed Cases: 5,211,172

Change Over Yesterday: 100,452

Total Deaths: 342,105

Total Recovered: 2,112,279

Nations hit with most cases: US (1,622,670), Brazil (347,398), Russia (335,882), UK (258,504) and Spain (235,290)

Source: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center

AstraZeneca, Oxford get $1.2 bn grant for Covid-19 vaccine: The US threw its weight behind one of the fastest-moving experimental solutions to the coronavirus pandemic, pledging as much as $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca to help make the University of Oxford’s Covid vaccine. Read more here  

Facebook to hire more remote staff: Facebook plans to hire more remote workers in areas where the company doesn’t have an office, and let some current employees work from home permanently if they’d like to. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to “aggressively open up remote hiring” starting immediately with the US, particularly for engineering talent. Read more here  

Spotify allows employees to work from home until 2021: Spotify has told its employees in all territories that they are free to work from home until next year. Spotify joins other internet companies extending work-from-home policies through the end of 2020, including Facebook and Google. Twitter has said it will let staffers work from home indefinitely. Read more here  

VC funding fell 20 percent since the onset of Covid-19: Global venture capital funding has dropped by 20% since the onset of the coronavirus crisis in December 2019. China had a drop of over 50% in funding relative to the rest of the world in January and February. The US has so far experienced only relatively small change in startup funding since December: a drop of less than 10 percent by March. Read more here  

Another day of zero cases in New Zealand: New Zealand has only 27 active coronavirus cases, as the country reported another day of zero new infections after easing some of the world's toughest lockdown measures this month. Read more here  

Uniqlo will start selling face masks this summer: Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo will start selling face masks this summer at its stores, chairman and CEO Tadashi Yanai said, as global demand surges for protection against the coronavirus. The face masks will be made of the same material used for the brand's AIRism underwear that is cool and dries quickly. Read more here  

Specials 

How to rethink stock market investments during Covid-19

Looking at first-quarter earnings reports from the nearly 90 percent of S&P 500 companies reveals signs of trouble, but not cataclysmic shock. But Covid-19 shutdowns only began in late March, meaning their economic effects won’t truly show up until the next earnings season. For investors, the challenge is twofold: predicting when that rebound will come, and picking which stocks will win and which will lose when it does. Read some strategies here  

How remdesivir moved from back shelf to best hope for treating Covid-19

Remdesivir’s journey from idea to treatment is unprecedented. That path, by necessity, has taken advantage of innovative regulatory pathways to–and is telescoping–the normal drug-development time-line, to meet urgent medical needs while producing a safe, effective drug. TIME conducted dozens of interviews with the doctors involved in the first human studies of the drug in the sickest patients, public-health experts and industry insiders to create the most comprehensive chronicle yet of how a new therapy can emerge in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic when the urgent need to treat patients clashes with normally time-consuming regulatory requirements to ensure safety and efficacy. Read the full story here