Dow soars more than 1600 points on hopes of slowing coronavirus spread

Stocks closed with major gains Monday on hopes that the coronavirus pandemic would peak sooner in the U.S. than had been expected.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed with a gain of 1,627 points, soaring almost 7.7 percent Monday. The S&P 500 rose 7 percent and the Nasdaq composite gained 7.3 percent on the day.

A sharp rise in Dow futures trading Sunday paved the way to a 1,000-point rally in industrials when the market opened Monday, fueled largely by optimism from President Trump and potentially encouraging data from New York.

Trump said during an unplanned Sunday press conference that he saw the “light at the end of the tunnel” of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 10,000 lives in the U.S. as of Monday afternoon, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. The president’s comments came just hours after U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams compared the pandemic to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “happening all over the country.”

New York also reported on Sunday a decline in daily COVID-19 deaths, which dropped from 630 deaths on Saturday to 594 deaths Sunday. Cuomo said Monday that the slowdown was “hopeful, but it’s also inconclusive,” adding that if new cases are plateauing, “we are plateauing at a very high level” and there is “tremendous stress on the health care system.”

The stock market has taken wild swings since the spread of COVID-19 began rapidly accelerating within the U.S. in late February, crashing from record highs and rallying to make up losses throughout the past six weeks. 

Even so, the pandemic has caused even broader, unceasing economic damage across the U.S. plunging the country into its deepest downturn since the Great Depression.

More than 10 million Americans filed for unemployment in the final two weeks of March, and economists estimate the current real-time unemployment rate could be higher than 10 percent.