Welcome to the Dividing Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Hello and welcome to today's COVID and markets brought to you by the Dividing Cafe podcast.

This is David Bonson and the managing partner of the Bonson Group. And we are coming to you on

Wednesday, May the 20th with all things COVID and all things markets. The Dow was up 370 points today,

so basically made back what it had dropped yesterday, leaving us with that roughly 1,000 point gain

from Monday. Monday, still the

net net move on the week three days through the market trading week.

Oil is approaching $34 a barrel on the WTI crude.

That's about a 5% move higher today.

So cross the board, very healthy day for risk assets.

Then in terms of health, we're going to get into a number of different metrics here.

Well, first of all, the case growth yesterday was 1.3%.

It had been 1.6% on the same day one week earlier. Absolute cases were

at 20,000 plus change, so down from about 21.5,000 a week ago. I think there's still sort of

symbolic significance in getting that absolute case number below 20,000 and holding there.

That's certainly the projection very soon, hopefully, you know, by later this week, early next week.

And then all projections still are that we will be below 10,000 in new cases by the end of June.

Keep in mind, because I think 10,000 sounds like a high number,

but that's 10,000 new cases from testing that we think will be to lower than 10,000 in a month.

That's in a country of 330 million people. You're averaging about one and a half percent of those

cases, so that would be 150 people that are, you're averaging about one and a half percent of those cases.

So that would be 150 people that are more critical or severe.

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