QFs immediate response is tough on a lot of people and management will find ways to make it inequitable and a larger pain than it would otherwise be, but it will happen. It also may get worse, and those that consider that they have the best deck chairs may have the same problem as those in steerage.
For better or worse, the world we have expanded business travel and tourism, and everyone was happy. plane builders were happy, airline owners were happy, govts were happy. those in the supporting industries were happy for the growth of global travel, the oil industry got to sell a bulk product line that otherwise was a nuisance, with little demand.
At the same time, the viral growth of our populations led to crowding in ever larger numbers, we have always been crowded, around campfires in caves, around the village idiot, around the sewer system to avoid night pots...
And we arbitraged the daylights out of trade, transferring our village, county, state, country economies into globalised economies.
And the investors got happier still.
Regulators accommodated lobbyists to take up the most intriguing inventions of devices to make wealth, CDO's, derivatives and similar fanciful inventions. When these resulted in bubbles being burst by the splay of cards falling from the house, then wall street got the happy times bailout of the millenium, free money and the reduction in interest rates globally to near zero, or zero, to achieve a restart of the economy stalled by the bankers greed. the bankers won again.
After 40 years of warnings about the risk of pandemics arising from the greater mobility of the population, we arrive at November 2019.
SARS COV2 is not the worst case that could arise, it is not TEOTWAWKI, apocalyptic, zombie like cases, not even close. COV2 is a variant of 1.0, and it added a minor trick, that it omitted symptoms in most cases, and had an extended infectious period. It has a slightly different group it affects adversely (assume that between alive and dead, dead is undesirable state). For a bad day, call... 555-HEMORRHAGIC, and add extended asymptomatic infectious period, and population mobility.
Trump's easter call is both right and wrong. remarkably he understands the impact on his hotels and wants to fill beds, which comes from the planet getting back to business. pulling the ESH on planet earth results in a fair bit of mess, and from that mess the usual suspects get hurt. at least immediately. the romanovs and mme Antoinette are testament to the point that pushing your luck on the tolerance of the masses in the face of inequality and injustice can bite back. Getting the economy going again is important.
So, how does this effect QF staff? Will FIFO keep the west happy?
No idea.
China's recent figures show they affected the rate of case development, but have not ceased spread. this lil' puppy has legs! Singapore had implemented one of the best responses, and the figures indicate that even with the benefits of a highly managed group, that the spread still occurs, reduced, not stopped. reduced is good, it assists minimising the demand on resources at ICU etc, but doesn't eliminate the spread.
Back around 10 Jan, i started analysis of the spread comparing every daily report to a monte carlo simulation, until 16th feb when it appeared pointless to continue that exercise. from 28th January it wasn't needed to guess where this was going. 10 January, the sequencing and description of the virus suggested that an order of chloroquine was worth the cost. The modelling highlighted one thing, that is that the virus needed to exist quite a while before 8 Dec, and there is a very large population of asymptomatic infection needed. The latter is good and bad news. The CFR is understated on the facts, but the IFR is much lower when the asymptomatic cases are considered.
Vaccines are a way off, if existing antivirals or repurposed drugs that have an effect on the virus or the ACE2 receptor are effective, then the impact of the handbrake turn on the planet is reduced. At present that is the only ray of sunlight on the panorama of ineffective preparation that exists. China's success is great, for stage I of the transmission, the continued leakage suggests that more work is in order, as it is in the early stages of a wash 'n rinse cycle.
At some point Trump's easter opening starts to be an option. Bombing the village to save it is not a good option, but that may be where we are currently heading. Both China and SG suggest that the effect of bombing isn't going to be meaningful in the end, towards flattening the curve, and managing the demand on the health care system. There is a possibility that was always a forlorn hope with this virus. Getting back to business may be a better option at some point in time. Bolting the barn door around 8 Dec may have been wise, but as the reported first hint of the cluster of pneumonia was around 29 Dec it was never like;ly without chicken entrail reading, or listening to the number of warnings that existed for the last 40 years. If shutting down the planet doesn't work what is left is protecting the likely victims.At least to mid february, approximately 95% of infections were asymptomatic, of the remaining 5%, 20% had serious symptoms, and of those 40% reqd ICU, and of those, about half perished.
CFR of around 4% is quoted, but that is understated as the event is ongoing, those that died as of today didn't get sick up to today, the fatalities are the result of cases 14-21 days ago, when the cases were 1/2 to 1/3rd of the current, so actual CFR is 2 to 3 times higher...
CMR, Crude mortality rate is... 30,879/7,700,000 = 0.401%. today
IFR is approximately 4%x 3 x 5/100 = 0.600%
Those figures suggest that this thing is well into its "program 67" [Apollo 13...] We are going to hit saturation in the next couple of infection cycles... and thereafter global quarantine is irrelevant except in unique cases, like Antarctica. From that point on, the medical system will be challenged, there is a shortage of medical PPE consumables and ventilators etc. and that will increase mortality rates for those that would have survived at any other time, so in the case surge, the 50/50 chance of survival will degrade for lack a nail, and bad timing.
2 weeks out, there is no logical benefit in a global shutdown. But logic went out the window a while ago, when the politicians got a whiff of panic. Defending those at identifiable risk is rational.... but isn't being done. Instead, we are heading towards a global catastrophe of our own making. If calm heads don't prevail, then wondering about what an airline will do will be the least of our concerns.
The sun will rise, usually does and will continue until the He burning has been going for a while.
Post the event, if we are smart and restart the economy and then think about future protections for the next time with a rampant Ebola, then global trade cranks up, and operations commence. IMHO, there will be a pent up demand, but that will be tempered over time as well by the realisation that the world has had a warning shot across its bows. We either need to get to grips with emergent virus' or we need to reinforce protections of community spread. The latter is more of the same we are experiencing now. The compelling reason to continue global travel is that it underpins about 25% roughly of all global economic activity. Stopping airlines affects everybody including govts who have their snouts in the cash flow and the revenues.
Interventions are closer overwatch to detect the problem earlier... better tracking of individuals [freedom lost] embedding medical monitors from other countries into the data collected locally, to ensure unpleasant facts get acted on promptly without political interference [you don't want that invasion of sovereignty? Don't send your people out of the country. It may be that samples need to be taken before boarding a flight, or on arrival to aid in detection of contagion later. IR cameras are a lousy defence but if employed they need to be at all departure points, that is the point to stop travel. The arrival case puts all in the same aircraft "in the same boat", so imaging needs to be done before all deplane. Letting flights in from an epicenter as occurred from Wuhan is unconscionable. It was wrong at the time, and it looks wrongerer now.
Mass transport is a risk all by itself to the global community, this virus is but a warning, with tragic consequences to many, but it is just a warning that to disregard nature has consequences.
ref: Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2020) - "Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) – Statistics and Research".
Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus' [Online Resource]