Amarin Corp Plc (AMRN)

[biotechtrader2020]

Like singapore, NYC is an international hub - but that is the where the similarity ends.
Singapore had a good pandemic response team that had learnt its lesson by watching previous epidemics like SARS in 2003 (32 deaths in singapore).

As soon as they heard about the outbreak in wuhan, singapore signficantly stepped up their screening process for covid patients.
They had 1000 centers for covid response (remember it is a very small place), where people could get government subsidized treatment with 5 days of paid medical leave for them to stay at home and avoid transmitting it to others.
Also, the prior experience with SARS taught citizens to wear mask and practice social distancing when news of such outbreaks are reported.
In January/feb timeframe, they did aggressive contact tracing and isolated suspected infections to contain the scope of the outbreak.

The pandemic response guidelines from singapore ministry of health is an excellent document to read - it has color coding to describe various stages of an outbreak (green being best and red being worst). They responded when the outbreak was green - so contact tracing, testing, quarantine + treatment is the best suggested course of action. (In US, we are in red when the pandemic task force started acting like adults around the week of march 17. The only suggested course is lockdown+social distancing to spread out the infections and blunt the curve as it blasts through the population).
To summarize, singapore had a small fire, they were prepared with a fire extinguisher in hand, used it early and contained the fire.

Contrast this with US where:
+ We acted early to close border with china - this is good.
+ Even though outbreak in china was bad in Jan and cases were diagnosed in 4 countries and a PCR test was being used in china, CDC decided that there was no need to scale up testing.
+ It is quite likely that asymptomatic covid patients were returning from Iran, Italy and china (hotbeds at that time - keep in mind, the first diagnosed case had recently returned from Iran).
+ Around Feb 25th Alex azar talked about $2.5 billion in aid to supply 300 million masks.That money should be enough to supply many free masks to the entire population of the US. Even health care workers don't have enough n95 masks - let alone common folks.
+ Intelligence committee compared this to the 1918 pandemic - the powers that be decided to sell shares while reassuring us that everything was fine.
+ Now, we are at a stage where the pandemic is going to blow through the population. With lockdown and social distancing, we are trying to space out the number of hospitalized patients so that the health care system is not stressed.
+ In case the hospitalized patients recover, we have a new surprise for them - a hospital bill in excess of $30,000
https://time.com/5806312/coronavirus-treatment-cost/
+ we will make the testing free, give you a $1000 check and if covid does not kill you, the hospital bill will.

To summarize, we noticed a fire. Sold stocks and poured fuel on the fire. After waiting for the fire to grow to monstrous proportions, we called the firefighters.