REM’s classic 1987 song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” reentered the charts on iTunes Tuesday amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
The song reached No. 72 on the iTunes top 100 chart Friday, ranking under Taylor Swift’s 2019 song “The Man,” among other hits.
The rock song’s repeated chorus tells listeners “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”
The spike in the 33-year-old song’s popularity comes after the World Health Organization declared that the spread of the novel coronavirus has reached pandemic levels. At least 137,000 people around the world have been infected by the virus that began spreading in China late last year, and fatalities reached more than 5,000 around the world Friday.
In the United States alone, there have been more than 1,200 confirmed infections. Three states, Montana, Idaho and West Virginia, are the only states remaining in the U.S. that do not have at least one confirmed case of the virus, The New York Times reported. Washington state and New York have been hit among the hardest in the nation, with hundreds of confirmed infections each.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the lead scientists behind the Trump administration’s coronavirus response, said Friday that disruptions to everyday life in the U.S. over the spread of coronavirus could last up to eight weeks, as several cities, states and organizations cancel or reschedule large events and businesses call on workers to stay at home.
“I mean it’s unpredictable but if you look at historically, how these things work, it’ll likely be anywhere from a few weeks up to eight weeks or more,” Fauci said on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” adding that he hopes it’s going to be only two, three or four weeks.
Markets bounced back Friday after suffering their worst day of losses since the 1987 stock market crash Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average surging 1,000 points after trading opened Friday morning.
The S&P 500 rose 3.9 percent Friday after falling 9.5 percent the day before. The Nasdaq composite gained 4 percent following a 9.4 percent drop.