In This Time of Plague - 17-03

[davidgillon]

 

Talking to my sister a lot today. She stayed home from school, which is completely justifiable, her husband is multiply high risk, but she was feeling guilty about it. That was helped somewhat by two other teachers with high risk family members also being out, and by her head telling her that if she'd come in she'd have sent her home anyway. Apparently they have 17 families self-isolating in the school population, though she suspects some of them are just isolating on general principle, rather than having a reason for it (there's still only a single case in County Durham). She suspects the head is hoping for enough teachers to self-isolate she can justify closing the school, whatever Boris says.

I find myself wondering how this compares with the polio outbreaks, but I suspect 70 years on the world is so highly geared that the comparison isn't really valid.

In more trivial things I manged to get Ark running after a week of it refusing to start. I finally thought to do a file verify and Steam reported 7 were dubious. Whoops. Ran first time after that, though it had wiped all of my settings, meaning I had to fix them all from memory. Looks like I've just about got everything sorted, so I'll be hiding in a virtual world whenever I'm too stressed for the real one. I'm seriously considering ticking the option to turn off in-game diseases as catching mega-rabies when I'm trying to hide from COVID-19 would truly suck.

Some of the projections for aviation I'm seeing are apocalyptic. One forecasts only 30 airlines will survive by May. So it's likely we'll see long term changes from this, even with government intervention.

Interesting Times.

 

Comments

[yhlee]

My sister was commenting on whether polio would seem real as a comparison for kids of Ara's generation and I remarked that I was pretty sure Ara had never heard of polio. For that matter, polio wasn't quite real to me although I did read about it...

I suspect the only reason I'm not more scared of the domino effects in the economy is that I simply don't know enough to really understand what's going on. (I mean, not hard--I don't understand econ at all.)

Stay safe, y'all.

[davidgillon]

A good friend wears a leg-brace courtesy of polio as a child, so that's kind of hard to miss. But if I didn't know her I'm not certain how real it would be to me, and I have a few years on you, never mind Ara. The early '50s are a long time ago.

One irony of all this is this economy-wise is the idea of sending every American a cheque. Who'd have thought Trump would be adopting Andrew Yang's Universal Basic Income*!

* Not that Yang's proposal was actually universal when you got down into the details. A lot of disabled people would have got less.

[jesse_the_k]

....In the Pollyanna mode, could our experiences help shift society to more online interaction and less business travel?

[davidgillon]

I suspect there's going to be a lot more pressure for widespread work-from-home, and some of that will carry over to business travel. How much remains to be seen. A lot of people see it as a perk, or a status symbol, so there'll be pressure to reinstate it.

[hilarita]

I feel sorry for all airline employees, but not for the companies per se. This provides an excellent opportunity to force airlines down a more environmentally friendly route by incentivising investment in clean travel, for when we can travel again in a year or two's time.

[davidgillon]

The new generation of aircraft is markedly better in terms of pollutants than even those built post-2000/pre-2015, and there's investment in green fuels, but the estimates are we're a decade away from usable electric or hydrogen powered airliners, and even those are likely to be only short-haul.

TLDR: there's not a great deal of investing they could do.