Everything Is Not Back To Normal Yet, But If We Pull Together And All Work Hard... Maybe Sometime In 2021

Death Of A Salesman by Nancy Ohanian

Americans so desperately want everything to go back to pre-pandemic normal that they're going to make the pandemic much worse. It's not a TV show with a happy ending; this reality could get a lot worse. In fact, it already is. There are still around 20,000 new confirmed cases in the U.S. everyday. With early frontline states New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Michigan, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland and Delaware starting to get the outbreak under control, focus has moved south and west and the new frontline states are California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, the Dakotas, Arizona, New Mexico, Iowa, Nebaska, Arkansas and Wisconsin.

A few days ago a piece at Axios by Felix Salmon caught my attention. Largely because of weak, confused anti-government Republican governance, Americans are abandoning whatever there was of mask wearing and social distancing. Salmon noted that we're "about to embark upon the most momentous social experiment in living memory: What happens when you take laissez-faire economic principles and apply them to public health?" The central tenet of capitalism is that when millions of people make their own individual risk/reward calculations, the result is superior to top-down decision-making by the government. But that isn't what epidemiologists are saying about the pandemic, not with America continuing to see tens of thousands of new coronavirus cases every day. And not with so few of them resulting in a comprehensive contact-tracing review. "Given the amount of virus in the population,"he wrote, "there's a non-negligible probability that any of us could be unknowingly infectious today. Americans react to this uncertainty in line with their own idiosyncratic risk appetite. Younger folks, in particular, tend to be happier making riskier decisions, as do people like undercover police officers. As businesses reopen, decisions about things like whether to step into a crowded elevator will be made on a bottom-up rather than a top-down basis. Some people will be willing; others won't. (Both sides will view the other group as outliers.) Governors can't simply decree that business is back to usual. So long as a significant proportion of society is unwilling to resume economic activity, employment and GDP will remain depressed. Countries with more forceful and effective government responses have been able to bring the rate of infection down to a level at which most citizens can reasonably feel safe from the disease. That's not going to happen here-- and it's not going to happen in places like Brazil, India, or Mexico, either."

The biggest daily spikes are no longer in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium or any of the European countries that were hit so hard right off the bat. These are the countries with the biggest one-day reports-- over a thousand-- Thursday (first number) and Friday (second number):

• Brazil +31,890... +30,136
• U.S. +22,268... +25,393
• India +9,889... +9,471
• Russia +8,831... +8,726
• Pakistan +4,801... +3,985
• Chile +4,664... +4,207
• Peru +4,284... +4,202
• Mexico +3,912... +4,442
• Iran +3,574... +2,886
• South Africa +3,267... +2,642
• Bangladesh +2,423... +2,828
• Saudi Arabia +1,975... +2,591
• U.K. +1,805... +1,650
• Colombia +1,766... +1,515
• Qatar +1,581... +1,754
• Egypt +1,152... +1,358
• Sweden +1,080... +1,056

Salmon noted that as bad as the global picture is-- and it is really bad outside of Western Europe and East Asia-- "the U.S. has failed to hammer down the rate of new infections, which remain around 20,000 per day even as most states begin to come out of lockdown. Some states, such as Arizona [plus Texas and Florida], are seeing new record highs, even as the National Institutes of Health warns that a warm and humid summer won't help dampen the spread of the disease.





I keep talking with people who want to end sheltering in place for themselves. Big mistake-- not just for themselves and their circles, but for society. There is a safe way to reopen and an unsafe way. Trump's excuse for "leadership" is guaranteeing that the U.S. is reopening in the least safe way possible. Look at the new cases in the original half dozen worst hit western European nations:

• Spain +318
• Italy +518
• Germany +491
• France +611
• Belgium +140
• Netherlands +210

Compare that to the half dozen Trump states that have most strenuously ignored social distancing and safe practices and safe reopening guidelines:

• Texas +2,080
• Florida +1,305
• Georgia +774
• Arizona +1,579
• Iowa +355
• South Carolina +448

Drew Jones wrote an interesting piece about airplane travel for the Washington Post yesterday. After having resumed flights just over a week ago, Lion Air just down again yesterday. The company said that did so because passengers refused to follow health protocols.

According to data from [Indonesia's] Central Statistics Agency, domestic flight volume was down 82 percent in April, with 838,100 passenger on flights, compared with 4.6 million in March. International travel numbers were worse, with a 95 percent drop in passengers leading to 26,000 fliers last month as opposed to 558,700 in the month of March.

Lion Air has promised to monitor the coronavirus outbreak to keep the company’s “flight operations under applicable provisions of safety and security aspects,” and to “continue to implement health protocols according to the provisions” that prevent the spread of covid-19, but for now there’s no date set for when air travel will resume.

This week, Business Traveller reported that American Airlines is resuming flights from Dallas to Dublin July 7 and from Charlotte, LAX, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Raleigh to London beginning August 5-- as well as flights from Charlotte to Munich, JFK to Paris and Madrid, Miami to Madrid Rio and Sao Paulo, Chicago to Athens, Barcelona and Dublin, and Philadelphia to Madrid and Zurich. There is already one daily flight from JFK to Heathrow operating. American is also restarting many domestic flights and reopening some of their Admirals Club lounges-- as well as offering double their virtually worthless AAdvantage miles for customers who are crazy enough to fly before September 30 (and book during June).

Turkish Airlines resumed domestic flights this week-- despite serious and ongoing COVID-spikes-- and will start flying to 40 counties this month. Although the pandemic is out of control in much of the Middle East, Emirati, Emirates and Etihad Airlines are all flying internationally again. New confirmed cases in the Middle East reported yesterday:

• Iran +2,886 (1,992 cases per million)
• Saudi Arabia +2,591 (2,753 cases per million)
• Qatar +1,754 (23,326 cases per million)
• Egypt +1,348 (304 cases per million)
• Turkey +930 (1,998 cases per million)
• Oman +770 (2,960 cases per million)
• Iraq +1,006 (245 cases per million)
• UAE +624 (3,809 cases per million)
• Kuwait +723 (7,183 cases per million)
• Bahrain +539 (8,155 cases per million)

Although Israel, which has been relatively strict about social distancing rules and has made some good progress in containing the pandemic, doesn't allow non-Israelis to enter the country, Air Canada, Delta, Lufthansa and Wizz (a neo-Nazi airline based in Budapest) have restarted flights to Tel-Aviv. (United never stopped flying there.) Israelis who fly into the country must self-quarantine for 2 weeks. Israel is considering allowing non-citizens to start flying into the country again June 15.