- Zoom Video Communications has soared more than 5% this week as investors bet coronavirus will have workforces working remotely.
- A CDC official encouraged businesses to prepare for that prospect Tuesday in a newsconference.
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Coronavirus has sent the stock market into a full-on rout, but some names are staying above water.
Zoom, a video conferencing company, is one of those stocks. As equity indices sank, the company was up as much as 8.15% Thursday morning. That's after rising through the week - at Wednesday's close, shares were up 5% against where they ended the week Friday.
It's because investors are betting that as coronavirus worsens, a larger share of the US and global workforce will need to work from home and videoconference into meetings. That bet falls in line with the outlook Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, laid out in a newsbriefing Tuesday.
Messionner said businesses should make plans to allow employees to work remotely, adding that large in-person meetings and conferences should be canceled. "We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare, in the expectation that this could be bad," Messionner said.
Zoom's ascent is the exception to the norm in a week that has pummeled equities. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is headed for its worst week since the financial crisis, down 2,034.82 points, about 7%, since last week.
That's because potential for coronavirus to become a global health crisis, rather than a regional one, became clear this markets week, as countries from Italy to Iran reported a spike in new cases. The World Health Organization said Wednesday that there are more new cases of the novel coronavirus outside of China than in it.
The CDC believes an outbreak in the US to be inevitable, though President Donald Trump pushed back on that in a press conference Wednesday, stressing that the US is "very, very ready for this."
"We know one thing. It is actually more communicable than the flu. It passes between people very, very easily," Ezekiel Emanuel, special adviser to the director general of WHO and a former Obama adviser, said on MSNBC Wednesday, adding he found the president's address "a little incoherent."
