Flying in the U.S. is about to get better for all the wrong reasons.
Consider, in the vicinity of our acting president’s former home town:
NEW YORK — First, a lawyer who commutes between the suburbs and his midtown Manhattan office was diagnosed with the coronavirus. Then, his wife and two children tested positive, along with a neighbor who drove him to the hospital.
By Wednesday afternoon, another friend, his wife and three of their children were also infected.
In the span of 48 hours, what began as one family’s medical crisis had spiraled well beyond their Westchester County home, shuttering Jewish schools and synagogues and crystallizing the virus’s power to propel anxiety across a region that is among the nation’s most densely populated.
The acting infectious disease expert called into Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Thursday night. He claimed the death rate from the novel coronavirus COVID-19 was not 3.4% as the World Health Organization estimated on Tuesday. WHO’s original estimate was 2.3%.
“Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died; by comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a Tuesday briefing.
But the U.S. chief executive who believes his amazing genes keep him svelte and vigorous told Hannity he disagrees:
“Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” Trump said. “Now, this is just my hunch but based on a lot of conversation with a lot of people who do this, because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor.”
“Personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent,” the acting health expert told viewers.
The acting president is less worried about people’s health than about what a pandemic could do to economic output (CNN):
Trump continued by discarding his own administration’s advice to stay home if you’re feeling sick: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better, and then when you do have a death, like you’ve had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York.” No deaths have been reported in New York.
A friend returned last night from Arizona. By plane, naturally, like the gentleman who returned to Raleigh on February 22 after visiting that infamous Seattle nursing home. He just tested positive for the coronavirus.
Airlines are bracing for a turndown in travel. British Airways is reducing flights between London and New York. United Airlines is cutting April scheduled flights between the U.S. and Canada by 10 percent, and its remaining international schedule by 20 percent.
Josh Barro writes for New York magazine’s Intelligencer:
Demand for air travel is falling in part because many non-airline companies are telling employees to cancel or postpone travel plans. Google, Twitter, Amazon, Salesforce, Nestle, L’Oreal, Cargill, Ford, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and many others have imposed restrictions on business trips. Company and industry conferences are being canceled. It will take longer to learn how the crisis has been affecting leisure travel — individuals don’t announce in the newspaper when they’re not traveling — but business travelers are especially important to airline profitability because they tend to buy expensive tickets in premium cabins and often book close to the date of travel.
Airlines are increasing ticketing flexibility and lowering fees for ticket changes. These adjustments could be just the beginning, Barro writes, but “won’t do much for the airlines if and when we come to a point in the epidemic where social distancing measures make reducing air travel a necessity in the U.S.”
I haven’t booked a flight for August’s Netroots Nation conference in Denver for obvious reasons. Another is that I was exposed to Legionnaires’ disease last September and was sick as a dog for a week before news broke of the outbreak. I didn’t have the pneumonia, but a 103 degree fever got my attention. The doctor believed I might have had Pontiac fever, a milder form of Legionnaires’. The incident put me on notice I am now of a certain age at risk from such infections.
On the upside, flying may soon resemble the days after the September 11 attacks, only without the SWAT teams with submachine guns. It was actually the best time to fly. I wrote once about departing Boston’s Airport of the Living Dead 10 days after the attacks. Walking down the empty jetway onto the plane, brother, was that flight attendant happy to see me.
“Hi! Welcome to Delta!” she said, smiling with more than normal enthusiasm.
“Can I help you find your seat?” she asked.
Then, looking at the empty plane, she said, “Sit anywhere you like.”
“What are you drinking? I’ll bring you two,” she said. “Complimentary.”
And she did.
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