Hello and thanks for joining part one of the special edition of Thoughts of the

market I'm Andrew Sheets chief cross-asset strategist for Morgan Stanley and I'm

Matthew Harrison managing director and equity research analysts covering biotechnology.

Today we'll be talking about the current spread of the coronavirus, how we expect that spread to look later

in the fall and what we think this could mean for markets.

It's Thursday, July 23rd at 2 PM in London.

Matt, it's nice to have you back on the program.

Thanks for having me again.

So, Matt, I'd like to start with maybe the most obvious,

the most important question as we're thinking

about COVID-19 in the United States.

As you're looking at the incoming data on the spread of the virus, is it getting worse?

Is it getting better? How are you thinking about that dynamic?

Sure, I think there are three things that I'm focused on. First, the rate of

exponential growth as opposed to linear or some other growth, second testing

positivity, and third, the areas in the country were experiencing

significant new spread of the virus.

Unfortunately, all three of those

have been getting worse over the past few weeks.

So first on exponential growth,

we started with a few states in the Sunbelt region and now we spread to more than half the

states experiencing exponential growth in new cases. Second, there are 14 or 15 states that have test positivity above 10%, which is the ratio of people that have tested positive over the total number of tests.

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