COVID-19 Impacts on Logan, MBTA, and Boston travel and tourism

stellarfun said:
COVID-19 is more serious than annual influenza. Take Italy for example,
Click to expand...

It kinda doesn't matter (and is kinda hard to tell).*

The "doesn't matter" (it is fatal enough) point is that it kills plenty-enough of people who get it.

The "kinda hard to tell" is that it is hard to say whether the seriousness of the disease or the inability to respond with "normal" care is why so many people are dying.

Bill Gates says it well (you can tell he's been thinking about this and doing the math for a long time)
There are two reasons that COVID-19 is such a threat. First, it can kill healthy adults in addition to elderly people with existing health problems. The data so far suggests that the virus has a case fatality risk around 1%; this rate would make it several times more severe than typical seasonal influenza and would put it somewhere between the 1957 influenza pandemic (0.6%) and the 1918 influenza pandemic (2%).

Second, COVID-19 is transmitted quite efficiently. The average infected person spreads the disease to two or three others. That’s an exponential rate of increase. There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or not even showing symptoms yet.
Click to expand...

www.gatesnotes.com

How to respond to COVID-19

Repost of Bill Gates’s New England Journal of Medicine article on how to respond to coronavirus and be prepared for the next epidemic.
www.gatesnotes.com www.gatesnotes.com

*I'm also disinclined to get drawn into fatality rate fights unless we're actually doing a math model. Fatality rate discussions appear to invites people to report "I got the flu and I'm still here" as if that gives them a benchmark against which they can multiply to say COVID19 is 10times worse than me personally experiencing 0 mortality.

[APPEND] Also there are people saying "Well Italy is old people and China is full of smokers so their hospitalization and mortality rates doesn't apply..."
 
Last edited:
The President of United Airlines said that in the past few days, bookings to Europe and Asia have totally collapsed and domestic bookings are down 70 percent.
 
Re: Amtrak
"The coronavirus outbreak has brought a steep fall in March passenger numbers and revenue for Amtrak, and the nation’s passenger rail company is warning of hard times ahead.

"Ridership is down, cancellations are up by more than 300 percent, and future bookings have fallen by half, Amtrak said Wednesday, citing the public health crisis that has led Americans to cancel travel in recent days.

"If the trend continues, Amtrak said revenue losses could be in the “several hundred million dollars” and throw off the company’s growth projections for this year. A plan to reduce spending is in place, and it includes service cuts and layoffs."

 
stellarfun said:
The President of United Airlines said that in the past few days, bookings to Europe and Asia have totally collapsed and domestic bookings are down 70 percent.
Click to expand...
I wonder what share of bookings has shifted from round trip to one way.
Here's the case that what will see for about the next 2 weeks will be the "one way ticket before hunkering down"

Since UVa is going virtual (similar to Harvard, they've said "don't come back from the spring break you're now on"), there are 14,000 trips back to Charlottesville that won't happen. Instead of CHO-xxx-BOS fares being $600 like they were just last week (for essentially the same travel days) they are $180 (for travel tomorrow). Also for travel tomorrow, Fares RIC-BOS are $75 one way. Fares DCA-BOS are $200 one way.
 
stellarfun said:
COVID-19 is more serious than annual influenza. Take Italy for example,


www.theguardian.com

UK minister tests positive as deaths outside China pass 1,000– as it happened

This blog is closed.
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

That's a mortality rate of about six percent, and a critical condition rate of about eight percent. SARS had a mortality rate of about 10 percent, MERS is about 30 percent. Apparently most MERS cases are hospitalized, so MERS is not running wild in the general population.

If annual influenza had a one percent mortality rate in the U.S. the number of deaths from a typical flu season of say 30 million cases would be 300,000 deaths rather than the 30,000 that do occur. Certainly, those percentages from Italy would be diluted if undetected and unrecorded infections were somehow counted. But even if a truer COVID mortality rate was near one percent, that's 10x higher than the 0.1 percent mortality of annual influenza.
Click to expand...
Stellar -- Anthony Faucci of NIH -- probably one of the best "Experts" overall on Virus diseases has just said [several times both in interviews and Congressional Testimony]:
Flu has about 0.1% mortality [give or take]
COVID-19 so far seems to be about 10X the Flu -- give or take some more due to less cases and less well documented cases
Click to expand...

Now we also know that COVID-19 mortality is concentrated in older males with existing Cardio or Pulmonary or Immunity problems -- indeed the "Average" [not quite specific as to which kind of average] age of mortality for the COVID-19 is 80
 
Took a Delta flight from EWR to BOS today. There were 9 other people on it.
 
mass88 said:
All travel to Europe is banned for the next 30 days. UK is an exception.
Click to expand...
Not quite all travel, as American citizens, legal permanent residents, and their families are exempted.

The restrictions will still surely result in a lot of flight cancellations.
 
My office in Cambridge just told everybody (at least 300 people in the office) to start working from home today, indefinitely. I wonder what the potential impact will be on our construction projects? Construction halted across the city soon?
 
Norwegian, who fly out of logan, cutting 4k flights and laying off half it's staff.
 
This is the domino effect that have financial experts worried that a recession will occur. People from several industries are being laid off, airline and sports being notable recent instances. The fear from these high profile industries will send people thinking twice about buying any non-necessity goods which will collapse that sector and once that fear takes hold and that cycle starts, it's hard to put a stop on it.

Unless the pandemic slows down with the increasing temperature, we are talking about months before the financial markets bottoms out.
 
Last edited:
^It really worries me that Australia is seeing community spread, with Tom Hanks getting corona there, and it's summer there.
 
tysmith95 said:
^It really worries me that Australia is seeing community spread, with Tom Hanks getting corona there, and it's summer there.
Click to expand...
"a Queensland Health official, without specifically naming the couple, said that all new reported infections are non-contact cases and that the patients are believed to have “contracted the illness outside Australia and traveled to Queensland with the virus.

"The married celebrity couple are two of seven new cases reported in Queensland on Thursday, among a total of over 130 cases across Australia.

"The pair are in isolation for 14 days in a hospital on the Gold Coast. Hanks first confirmed the positive test for the virus in an Instagram post. They are also assisting Queensland Health with contact tracing. Details of their movements outside Australia have not yet been made public."
www.hollywoodreporter.com

Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson Contracted Coronavirus in U.S., Australian Officials Say

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson are believed to have contracted the coronavirus in the U.S. or in transit from there, according to officials from Queensland Health, the government department overseeing the outbreak of the disease in that state.
www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
 
Boston is not an approved airport for the remaining European flights
 
Many local school systems shutting down for various amounts of time. My district (Lexington) is out for two weeks.
 
Witnessed a run on tortilla chips and salsa in real time at the Alewife Trader Joe's this afternoon. That was...not a sight I'll soon forget.😳
 
George_Apley said:
Many local school systems shutting down for various amounts of time. My district (Lexington) is out for two weeks.
Click to expand...
Medford Too. My understanding of the exponential growth curves based on this article suggest that the real need will come in May when everybody is going to be sick anyway, so I'd have expected them to be really, really aggressive at asking you to stay home or (or really gentle in enforcing attendance), but to still keep schools open for their important mental health, and food programs.

I think this is premature, based on what the CDC says:

Recommendations on school closure based on available science, reports from other countries and
consultation with school health experts.
1. There is a role for school closure in response to school-based cases of COVID-19
- for decontamination and contact tracing (few days of closure), in response to significant absenteeism of staff and students (short to medium
length, i.e. 2-4 weeks of closure),
or
- as part of a larger community mitigation strategy for jurisdictions with
substantial community spread* (medium to long length, i.e. 4-8 weeks or more of closure).

2. Available modeling data indicate that early, short to medium closures do not impact the epi curve of COVID-19 or
available health care measures (e.g., hospitalizations). There may be some impact of much longer closures (8
weeks, 20 weeks) further into community spread, but that modelling also shows that other mitigation efforts
(e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In
other countries, those places who closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread
than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).

3. In places where school closures are necessary, the anticipated academic and economic impacts and unintended
impacts on disease outcomes must be planned for and mitigated. Provision of academic support (e.g., tele-ed),
alternatives for school-based meals as well as other services (e.g., behavioral and mental health services) for
economically and physically vulnerable children, support for families for whom telework and paid sick leave is not
available, ensuring that high risk individuals continue to be protected must all be addressed. Special consideration
must be given for health care workers so that school closures do not impact their ability to work.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top