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

Hello and welcome to the COVID in markets podcast brought to you by the Dividend Cafe of the Bonson Group.

This is David Bonson. I am the chief investment officer here at the

Bonson Group bringing you my daily missive on COVID and markets. I woke up this morning and

the overnight NICA was down a tad. European markets were down a tad. U.S. futures were down a tad. They eased lower throughout the morning, actually. So they were down about 200 points going into the open, and they kind of stayed there, really. We were down basically right around 200 points most of the day. It might have rallied a little bit here and there going down only 100 and then falling a little beyond that.

But then in the final hour of trading, we petered out and dropped another 200 points.

So we closed down almost 400 on the Dow.

Now the S&P and NASDAQ, this would have been five days in a row up, so really

nothing surprising at all in market action today, but a lot in the health data I want to talk

about. I think one of the most important charts that I have put into the COVID markets.com since we began is the first chart in the

health data section today, visualizing the three data points that are most intensely monitored.

And when you look at the chart, you will see the positive test cases that have grown

pretty much in concert with our explosion

of testing capacity. But then you will see another line representing the seven-day average

of mortalities, which, as you know, from listening to me or reading me each day, has been continually declining,

and that has kept up even through this entire four- or five-week increase in cases.

And then you have another line being the ICU headcount,

which had steadily declined and is now sort of flat-lined.

So still down by 65 or 70% the ICU count from its peak.

The mortality's daily mortality are down nearly 80% from the peak, even as cases have continued to grow.

Now, I would point out that hospitalizations have increased as cases have increased,

but on a far, far lower scale than case growth itself.

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