Wall Street Opens Higher as Virus Cases Drop; Dow up 150 Pts

U.S. stock markets opened the week higher as the number of new infections of Covid-19 across the U.S. fell to its lowest in two months, strengthening hopes that the worst of the pandemic’s effects on the economy are past.

According to Johns Hopkins data, there were only 34,567 new cases on Sunday. While that reflects the usual dip reported at weekends due to delays in data compilation, it’s less than half the peak rate of new infections seen two months ago.

By 10:15 AM ET (1415 GMT) the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 210 points or 0.8% at 28,140 points. The S&P 500 was also up 0.8%, as was the Nasdaq Composite.

Megacap stocks were again outperforming, with Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) stock rising 3.7% on the back of a report by The Wall Street Journal that implicitly confirmed the strength of its lobbying power. The paper reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had lobbied actively for U.S. measures against ByteDance, the Chinese owner of video-streaming app TikTok that is one of its biggest competitors in the social media marketplace.

In addition, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock rose 2.6%, shrugging off news that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has lent its support to Epic Games, the owner of Fortnite, which is suing to uphold its rights not to pay 30% commissions to the iPhone maker on in-app purchases made through its App Store.

However, it wasn’t all one-way traffic. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock finally gave way to gravity, dropping as much as 6% in the first 15 minutes of trading before stabilizing to trade down 3.1%. Zoom Video (NASDAQ:ZM) stock meanwhile fell 1.6% after reports of an outage affecting its operations in the Eastern and central time zones. The outage comes at a bad time for the video-conferencing company, which is an important part of the virtual learning programs being offered by schools where Covid-19 has stopped them resuming in-person classes.

In biotech Novavax Inc (NASDAQ:NVAX) stock fell another 10.4% after the company said it would only have interim data from the stage 2 clinical trial of its experimental Covid-19 drug by December, effectively ruling out any chance of it being fast-tracked before the election on Nov. 3. Moderna Inc (NASDAQ:MRNA) stock fell 2.5% despite announcing a preliminary contract to sell millions of doses of its Covid-19 drug to the European Union.

AstraZeneca ADRs (NYSE:AZN), by contrast, rose 2.0% on the back of a report by the Financial Times that the administration is looking to fast-track authorization of its experimental drug, being developed jointly with Oxford University. President Trump had tweeted in frustration on Sunday at unnamed officials in the Food and Drug Administration whom he accused (without providing evidence) of delaying drug approvals so as to hinder his re-election chances.