RE: What is going on?7 Dec 2021 17:41
Get the masks off and open everything up now!
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened sharply higher on Tuesday as traders rushed to buy the recent dip, in the hope that the new variant of Covid-19 that caused it will not, after all, be economically disruptive.
By 9:45 AM ET (1445 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 409 points, or 1.2%, while the S&P 500 was up 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite was up a whopping 2.2%.
Data emerging so far from South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, suggest that it causes a milder form illness than the Delta variant that has been responsible for most of the 5.3 million deaths attributed worldwide to Covid-19 in the last 21 months. A strain that becomes dominant by virtue of its higher infectiousness, but which causes less strain on public health systems around the world, has the potential to speed up the progress toward herd immunity and bring the pandemic to an earlier end.