Breaking: COVID-19 cases surpass 1M worldwide with over 50,000 death toll

The COVID-19 cases have surpassed one million worldwide with over a death toll rate of over 50,000.

the Washington Post reported that the "global number of confirmed deaths from the coronavirus surpassed 50,000 and cases edged toward 1 million, according to tracking by Johns Hopkins University, as the outbreak continued to hit the United States and Europe especially hard."

Elsewhere, officials battled to maintain earlier successes in the fight against the novel coronavirus, weighing the desire to resume normal business operations against the risk of triggering new cases.

From an economic standpoint, it just gets worse. The latest news from the US was that a record 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment last week. More on that here: 

• Breaking: US Initial Jobless Claims rose to 6.648 million, new record high
• Fed's Kaplan: Unemployment could reach 8% at year's end

In other updates, around 60 per cent of fatalities reported worldwide have come from four European countries: Italy, Spain, France and Britain.

• BoE: Doubling size of corporate bond purchase programme to at least 20 billion pounds
• Coronavirus update UK: Death toll increased by 24% to 2,921 

Market implications

Not good. The US and UK are yet to peak and, even still, what is the peak? A peak of just the initial outbreak? In China, where the world is watching for signs of another outbreak as China sends its workforce back to business again, a county of 600,000 people in Henan province has been placed on lockdown, "illustrating the dangers of declaring victory too soon as authorities grow anxious to restart economic activity without unleashing a new wave of infections," the Washington Post reported. 

A return of the virus in China will be a worst-case and doomsday type scenario for humanity and global markets. We can expect volatility to remain high due to the uncertainty and fluidity of this crisis which likely supports the US dollar, CHF and yen as global stock struggle to recover while the world economy remains shut down.