Travelers at the airport.
The photo is by Ringo Chiu.
A new coronaviruses strain caused travel restrictions and cautions worldwide, and shares of cruise lines and airlines plummeted.
United Air Lines dropped 8.6% in premarket trading. Boeing was down by over 7%.
Norwegian Cruise Line and Royal Caribbean Cruises each lost 9% of their value.
The World Health Organization held a special meeting on Friday about a new variant of coronaviruses which has been identified in South Africa.
Travel stocks are sliding after the European Union, the UK, Japan and other countries imposed travel restrictions from South Africa.
We don't know a lot about this. We know that this variant has a large number of changes. The technical lead on COVID-19 at the World Health Organization said in a live streamed update that the concern is that when you have so many mutations, it can have an impact on how the virus behaves.
The EU Commission said on Friday that they are proposing to stop air travel from the Southern African region due to the new COVID-19 variant of concern.
The chief investment officer at wealth management group Kingswood said in a note that the news of the potentially more infectious and vaccine-resistant strain of coronaviruses follows increasing worries about a sharp rise of infections in Europe.
Covid is once again top of mind for markets. He said that the extent of the threat posed by this new variant is far from clear and that the stock market is likely to remain jittery until there is further clarity on this.
Global stock markets fell Friday as investors fled riskier assets and into gold. The rand fell to a one-year low.
Business Insider has an original article.
