it’s not only Virgin, Qantas is NO better. In fact very few large organisations deal with customer service well unfortunately.
Whocouldaknown that 3 years of seeing every other person as a potential cause for your demise, WFH, social isolations, QR codes everywhere, perspex screens, masks, moving to online communication (including an email that your flight has been cancelled and you need to get to YSSY in 45 minutes in the pouting rain) ..... could possibly lead to reduced customer service. It was already going downhill, yes. But Covid sure exacerbated it.
This is interesting. New paper from Ioannidis (world renowned epidemiologist) finding that the infection fatality rate from Covid was WAY lower than assumed. Way way lower.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...2280963v1.full
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/...dis-covids-ifr
It was obvious back in 2020 from Diamond Princess, USS Theodore Roosevelt & prison studies that the IFR was pretty low. All 3 settings had a “confined population", and so it was easy to measure IFR directly. About 0.5 - 1% on Diamond Princess - lot of elderly westerners (mean age of pax about 70) with extensive comorbidities. And way lower in other settings (TR and prisons tend to be young populations).
Anyway, these are Ioannidis's calculations for IFR based on 31 national seroprevalence studies
0.0003% at 0-19 years (3 deaths per million infections)
0.003% at 20-29 years (30 per million)
0.011% at 30-39 years (110 per million)
0.035% at 40-49 years (350 per million)
0.129% at 50-59 years (1,290 per million)
0.501% at 60-69 years. (5,010 per million)
This comes out to 0.035% for those aged 0-59 and 0.095% for those aged 0-69.
That was pre-vaccination and pre-Omicron. You can divide these numbers by a factor of 5 (maybe 10) today.
Anyway, death is in the young-middle aged is (fortunately) pretty rare. And even rarer in the Han population.
It's strange how often Wuhan security cameras captured people dropping dead in the street. Fortunately the rest of the world was spared these apocalyptic scenes.
Tis a strange world.