The second wave covered world markets. Should we expect salvation from a vaccine?

The second wave of the pandemic has taken the world seriously. Western countries and Russia are setting record after record in the number of new cases every day, and new lockdowns have been announced in France and Germany. Global markets experienced their worst week since March, with oil falling below $37 and the ruble approaching 80 to the dollar. The only hope for a decrease in the incidence without a new large quarantine is mass vaccination, which the Russian Ministry of Health promised to start from the beginning of November. But it is already clear that it will not begin at least until the end of the month, and the production volumes of the vaccine will be far from mass production.

The second wave is worse than the first

“Covid is devastating rural America as it sweeps across the plains of Montana,” read the headline of a feature story on the Bloomberg website Friday night. The epidemic in the United States is developing at an alarming pace - the number of new cases from mid-September to the end of October doubled, and on Thursday for the first time exceeded 90 thousand - one person in the country falls ill more than every second, The New York Times . notes

The death rate in almost all countries that experienced a severe first wave in the spring (including the United States) remains lower - both because the number of cases is growing primarily due to mild cases, which are now much more often detected through mass testing, and due to better training and increased experience of hospitals and doctors. Nevertheless, in the US, the number of daily deaths from COVID-19 remains above 1,000, and a total of 228,000 people died during the pandemic.

Things are not much better in Europe. The average daily death rate (7-day moving average) in the EU on October 25 exceeded 1,000 for the first time since May. Germany , the least of the major European countries affected by the first wave of the pandemic, and France this week introduced new, rather strict quarantines with the closure of restaurants, a ban on mass events and gatherings, and in France, even one hour a day allocated for walking. In the UK, Boris Johnson's government has so far resisted demands for a new lockdown, but the government's science council on Friday said the country's epidemic is worse than worst-case scenarios. You can see and compare how the situation is developing in different countries, most clearly here .

In Russia, if we take official statistics, the second wave is worse than the first in terms of incidence (one and a half times higher than the spring peak) and mortality (twice as high as the previous record in early June). It also differs in regional distribution - if in the spring more than half of new cases were in Moscow, now it is less than 30%, and the growth rate is lower than in the regions. For Russia, with our underfunded medicine outside of Moscow, this is a very unpleasant trend.

This is confirmed by ominous news from the regions - in Omsk, an ambulance brought patients to the local Ministry of Health, because the hospitals ran out of places, in Novokuznetsk the morgue for patients with COVID-19 overflowed , and in Altai, doctors of the covid hospital did not have time to perform autopsies of the dead. In at least 16 regions, there is a “critical situation with the bed fund,” Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova reported to Vladimir Putin, and a shortage of medical staff is almost everywhere, writes Kommersant . The Kremlin is outraged by these "impermissible situations", but has traditionally shifted responsibility to the heads of regions.

Markets remembered spring

World markets did not forget about the coronavirus even during the summer break — and this week they played the second wave in full. For both the US S&P 500 (-6.2% for the week) and the European Stoxx Europe 600 (-5%), last week was the worst since March. The fall, of course, has more than one reason - here is the uncertainty on the eve of the US presidential election (the stock market always falls a few days before the election), and the worst-than-expected quarterly reports of tech companies.

But the main concern is a new wave of the pandemic. “Markets are concerned about the prospect of a repeat of February-March. We may not have gotten to that point yet, but we are heading in a bad direction,” , told Chris Beauchamp, chief analyst at IG Group the WSJ. In Europe, new lockdowns in major countries are spoiling the economic recovery outlined in the third quarter and threatening a return to recession, writes Bloomberg. According to the agency's forecasts, France's GDP in the fourth quarter will fall by 3.1% after recovering growth by 18% in the third, and in Germany it will grow by an inconspicuous 0.5% after growing by 8.2% a quarter earlier.

over the week New lockdowns inevitably mean a drop in oil prices - and a barrel of Brent lost 10.3% in price , falling in price from $41.8 to $37.5 (data as of 23:00 Moscow time on October 30). “Oil held high for a long time thanks to hope. But the price of oil follows consumption, and consumers in Europe are locked up [for quarantine]. Equity markets can be dispersed with free money [from central banks], but this will not work with oil,” Global Risk Management trader Edward Marshall sadly stated in a conversation with the WSJ. There will be no repetition of the spring collapse, but oil price forecasts for the near future will be revised, analysts say. UBS Global Wealth Management already cut $5 a barrel from its forecast on Thursday.

over the week In such a situation, the ruble had no chance not to fall - the Russian currency lost 2.1% against the euro (falling from 90.6 to 92.5 rubles / €) and 3.8% against the dollar (from 76.54 to 79.5 rubles / $).

What will happen next

For all countries where the second wave is gaining momentum, there is an obvious prospect: either a new large quarantine or mass vaccination can slow down the spread of the epidemic. The largest countries in Europe have already introduced quarantines that are close in severity to spring ones. In Russia, they are not going to do this yet.

Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that there are no plans to introduce a “nationwide lockdown” in Russia, although “targeted decisions” can be made in specific regions. on the same day Sergei Sobyanin, whom the heads of other regions are traditionally guided by, said that he hopes that “tough measures that are being taken today in Europe” will not have to be introduced in Moscow. So far, Moscow has limited itself to introducing a system of QR codes in restaurants and clubs that operate at night, and a strict mask regime in transport.

Perhaps the authorities are counting on the imminent start of mass vaccination with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, the first in the world to be registered with fanfare and now undergoing so-called “post-registration trials”. In early October, Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko promised that mass vaccination of Russians would begin in late October - early November. It is now clear that this promise will not be kept, but the authorities remain optimistic. Sobyanin on Thursday said that Moscow would be able to "give access to the vaccine to everyone" in late November - early December. this morning His deputy Anastasia Rakova said that the Moscow authorities are preparing to introduce the vaccine into civilian circulation and are creating a special network of vaccination rooms for this.

The main question is whether there will be something to instill in these offices. Rakova on Friday noted that "the proper volume of the vaccine [so far] simply has not been received." The Moscow authorities are preparing technological sites, a city hall source told The Bell, “but production volumes are not our forecasts.” Manufacturers do promise a vaccine by the end of November, but how long the existing production volume will be enough to vaccinate everyone is a question.

Vaccination within the framework of “post-registration trials” on 30,000 volunteers is carried out from volumes made by the developer, the Gamaleya Institute, but its production capacity is quite small. Four pharmaceutical manufacturers, Binnopharm, R-Pharm, Generium and Biocad, are going to produce the vaccine in millions of doses, but, according to several The Bell interlocutors familiar with the process, the launch of the bioreactors necessary for mass production has so far been unsuccessful - and production in large batches has not yet been launched. They do not provide timelines. “The needs of the state far exceed the current production capabilities of any of the manufacturers,” admitted today in an interview with RBC. Rustem Muratov, CEO of the Alium holding (which includes Binnopharm),

On Thursday, even Vladimir Putin, for whom it is a special pride, acknowledged problems with the establishment of mass production of the vaccine. "There are certain problems associated with the presence or absence of a certain amount of equipment - "iron", as they say - for the deployment of mass production," he said at the Russia Calling forum.

Complex biotech production requires calibration, and this process cannot be precisely designed in advance - it must be calibrated empirically, Anton Gopka, general partner and co-founder of ATEM Capital, explains The Bell. “It usually takes a year to set up such a mass production, but here we are trying to keep within weeks,” he says. - In addition, stabilization is necessary - it assumes that all doses are the same, correct and clean. Ensuring such mass production is quite difficult.”

What do I get from this?

About whether a new quarantine will be introduced in Russia or Moscow, not only you and I, but also Vladimir Putin and Sergei Sobyanin themselves do not know. But the fact that mass vaccination will help stop the spread of the epidemic in winter does not seem to be worth counting on.

With the participation of Irina Pankratova