The Dow Jones industrial average plunged as much as 960.33 points, or 5 percent, despite the Fed’s announcement that it would place no limits on a huge bond-buying program it restarted a week ago.

That decline followed a week in which the blue-chip index fell more than 17 percent amid growing fears over the deadly bug and the devastation it threatens to the global economy. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq composite also sank as much as 4.9 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively, following similarly brutal losses last week.

The Fed’s latest action — coming on the heels of two emergency interest-rate cuts — led stock futures to climb into the green before the market opened, but ultimately failed to relieve investors rattled by the virus’s continued spread.

“At the end of the day, there’s only so much the public sector can do to protect us from the impact of this shutting down the economy for a long period of time,” said Lamar Villere, portfolio manager of the Villere Balanced Fund. “It’s unprecedented and investors are understandably very spooked by the potential risk here.”

Prior to the central bank’s announcement, futures had pointed to heavy losses after a trillion-dollar stimulus package failed to get through a key procedural vote in the US Senate.

Wall Street has been hungry in recent weeks for a fiscal stimulus from Congress to complement the Fed’s aggressive monetary policy actions. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Democratic and Republican lawmakers were close to a new deal Monday morning.

“I think we’re very close. We need to get this deal done today,” Mnuchin told CNBC on Monday.

Monday’s drops continued a volatile month in which the widening coronavirus crisis has sent global markets into a freefall. The virus has sparked fears of a deep recession because it has forced businesses to close and lay off workers while consumers stay shut in their homes to prevent the disease from spreading.

JP Morgan expects Thursday’s weekly federal jobless claims report to show a record 1.5 million people applying for unemployment benefits last week as the pandemic shuts down movie theaters, restaurants and arenas. That would mark a staggering increase from the prior week’s total of 281,000.

The evolution of the virus “will play an important role in driving further efforts at social distancing and bans on nonessential activity, which will determine the effects of the virus on labor markets and GDP,” JP Morgan senior economist Jesse Edgerton said.

Additional reporting by Thornton McEnery