Woo hoo! More Work from Home
Company imposed work from home measures, in line with what’s prescribed at the country level. Flights out to other EU countries are also discouraged at the moment. All of these are reasonable precautions.
The Girlfriend is in the midst of freaking out at the moment after someone in her school got infected with the virus. Given she’s far away at the moment, there’s nothing much I could do, aside from giving support and advice whenever it makes sense.
It also means that my scheduled trip to Berlin might have to be cancelled, or postponed for a later time.
Trump closes border from the EU, EU closes borders between themselves
So countries around the world are reacting, or being reactive at the moment. Trump decides that EU people shouldn’t go to the USA, except UK and Ireland, because they are non-EU (to him).
Italy imposes full lockdown. Spain declares state of emergency. Some parts of Catalonia is in lockdown. Most Eastern European countries have started to close borders. Infection numbers in major Western European countries are doubling by the day. So it does very much look like the ‘shit hits the fan’ moment.
Markets Ain’t Spared
US stock markets have fallen so rapidly that the circuit-breakers have halted twice this week. That was instituted in 1987 after a massive plunge in the stock markets specifically to address market crashes. So by that definition, we’ve seen the markets crash twice last week.
Pretty scary stuff.
Will it crash again? It’s hard to say. While I don’t think the crashes are strictly correlated to infection numbers, but by projection, peak infection in Europe and the US are still days to weeks away. Will people start panicking further? Or they will get on with their lives?
I certainly don’t know.
We’ll just have to wait it out and chronicle what happens in the coming weeks.
