In the same building that a confirmed coronavirus victim was found to be working at Wells Fargo five days ago; it has now been confirmed that an investment banker at UBS has been diagnosed with COVID-19 and quarantined. As a result, earlier today UBS evacuated its investment banking division operations on the 36th Floor at 555 California Street in the heart of the financial district in San Francisco.
Per a memo circulated by Dianna Rosenblatt (seen by BrokerChalk and circulated by building management at 555 California Street) the case was confirmed to be COVID-19 on the 36th Floor of the building. That floor houses operations for both UBS and Morgan Stanley. Based on confirming anonymous sources from the building itself and staffers, we can confirm that the coronavirus case was specific to an investment banker at UBS, and their offices were evacuated today.
We cannot confirm if Morgan Stanley evacuated their offices as well, given that they were on the same floor and received the same memo from building management. We are chasing down that information and their reaction to a second case of coronavirus in the same building.
We have also reached out to Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch for comment and whether or not they have made any decisions to evacuate staff in light of the same memo from 555 California Street management.
This makes five cases across global financial institutions in the past five days (that have been reported) here in the US. It is remarkable that two of those cases were found in the same building in San Francisco.
We’d imagine that both the corporate responses as well as ‘disinfecting’ efforts at 555 California Street are in overdrive at the moment. The coronavirus seems to be spreading at that specific building at the moment.
Developing…
