The Market And Covid-19 Update -- August 16, 2021

For the archives: this was the first trading day after the fall of Kabul, August 15, 2021. This was Monday, August 16, 2021. Kabul fell over the weekend of August 13 - 15, 2021. A twenty-year war and it ended in a 72-hour rout. September 11, 2021 will be the 20th anniversary of "9-11."

Dow and S&P 500 both closed at new all-time highs, and it wasn't even close -- the numbers were incredible when one looks at all the headwinds.

The Dow, already at a record high, finished 110 points higher; the S&P 500, also at a record high, finished twelve points higher.

The NASDAQ reversed direction in late trading and came close to erasing its opening losses, closing down only 29 points.

The only graph that really interests me for the moment: 

Berkshire Hathaway: sold GM.

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Covid-19

CDC data. The numbers have been posted, and they are very good numbers. Close to 900,000 vaccinations given on a Sunday.

Covid-19 update:

The Louisiana experience corroborates what I said from the beginning. 

Today's graphics:

Influenza viruse, including "seasonal flu" viruses and the Spanish flu: the genomes of all influenza viruses are composed of eight single-stranded RNA segments . These RNAs are negative-sense molecules.

From Nature.com:

The sequence of the 1918 influenza genome ("Spanish flu") proved to be puzzling and did not immediately answer researchers' questions regarding the strain's origin.

In the later flu pandemics that occurred in 1957 and 1968, the responsible strains appeared to have arisen through reassortment of avian-derived HA genes into human strains.

In contrast, the HA gene of the 1918 strain is most closely related to an influenza isolate obtained from swine.

The 1918 HA sequence bears some similarities to those sequences commonly seen among avian strains, but it differs from them much more than the strains responsible for the later pandemics. Indeed, when comparing the HA genes from all three pandemic strains to those from both Eurasian and North American avian species, the 1918 HA genes bear the least resemblance.

Furthermore, the later strains display fewer sequence differences overall and resemble Eurasian avian sequences much more closely than they do North American avian sequences. They also resemble avian sequences more closely than they do any mammalian sequence.

Taken together, these data suggest that pigs may have been an intermediate host for the 1918 strain, although this remains to be demonstrated.

Covid-19, from the NIH:

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory disease caused by a novel enveloped, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA betacoronavirus, denoted as SARS-CoV-2.

Others:

• measles: single-stranded, negative-sense RNA. Respiratory.
  
• mubella: single-stranded, positive-sense RNA. Respiratory.
• mumps: single-stranded, negative-sense RNA. Respiratory.
• polio: single-stranded, positive-sense RNA. Fecal-oral.

For more, see biology-pages.info.