Just a quick note repeating that I don’t believe there’s a global conspiracy goin on, which of course does not mean that every single politician is acting honestly….
If I understand Peter Hitchens, which is doing a very good job of questioning the narrative, he is not saying there’s a conspiracy, only a disproportionate and disastrous response, and fears that governments, having tasted this much power, will not let go of it easily.
As I said before, good questions, and time will tell.
Banging on on EuroGA about excessive curtailment of civil liberties is pointless.
Clearly a balance is being struck between economic damage and other stuff – otherwise nonessential manufacturing would have been shut down already. Lots of people are pushing for the building industry to be shut down, and the govt is resisting.
BeechBaby wrote:
Bezos, Mr Amazon, dumped his own stock in February. Then bought it all back. Now Peter, why would he do that?
Happening now I am afraid, not in two weeks time.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/27/jeff-bezos-sold-34bn-of-amazon-stock-just-before-covid-19-collapse
Like many company CEOs he got paid every year in shares that are locked for say X years and can be sold on Jan earning calls
The guy sells 1bn shares on every good quarter
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/04/jeff-bezos-sells-940-million-in-amazon-stock.html
Maybe he has vaccine and got an injection? otherwise he is less smarter than the guy who unrevealed this “conspiracy theory” 
Qalupalik wrote:
Event 201 Pandemic Exercise: Segment 3, Finance Discussion
Here is the consensus from last year:
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2019.pdf
I don’t think many have highlighted epidemic risk in WEF for 2020 apart from Microsoft boss (who’s foundation is also behind that staged video )
Peter,
The airlines will have to change their hygiene practices too.
I reckon there won´t be much left to change after this. But primarily countries have to revise their border protection and entry procedures. For the forseeable future, anyone entering a country will need to be subjected to either quick tests (once they are reliable) or quarantine. Bulgaria now imposes a police enforced quarantine for 28 days for anyone entering the country. I have friends who are there, they are being watched very carefully and will be punished massively the moment they step outside their flat. Some people trying to go for a walk in the park were fined bgn 5000 yesterday per head, which is about a yearly income. Hence BG have 300 tested cases as opposed to the disease running wild here.
Recommendations don´t do anything at all. Only fear of severe retribution will force people into a quarantine worth its name. In the countries which chose to ignore it, we now face national disaster both in terms of deaths and illness but also economical.
I was reading about some of the troubles in the south of italy with looting at food shops. An interesting point was that a number of people are employed on a cash basis so the government thinks are not employed and thus get no support packages. I wonder how what the scale of this is.
5 minutes in and he hasn’t conveyed a single piece of information, so I gave up. Maybe you can just summarize the new information that only he has quickly in a few bullet points?
I watched some of it.
The last one appears to be key to ventilation being successful. In Spain and Italy, most ventilated patients appear (?) to be dying, but this US guy claims to be saving them most of the time, so long as they get them in early.
An interesting point was that a number of people are employed on a cash basis so the government thinks are not employed and thus get no support packages
Of course; a chunk of any economy, and even more so in the southern parts of Europe.
I reckon there won´t be much left to change after this
Holiday travel will recover. Business travel has been declining for years, AFAIK.
I wonder whether what’s bad for the airlines will be good for GA? I’m sure the main routes will return but I could imagine the smaller routes and airfields being badly hit.
I’m sure Bulgarian society is the model on which we should base the new fascist world order 
The number of worldwide deaths from Coronavirus is now about 1/10 that of H1N1 ten years ago, but climbing and especially so in areas of ultra high human population density that nature does not like a whole lot, or so it seems to me. Might be a lesson there somewhere.
Interesting that Utah, founded by people with intent of isolating their society, has had two (2) deaths so far in an area roughly equivalent to that of UK. History does not fade as fast as one imagines. An airport friend who has family in a rural area of the state told me yesterday he’s fully aware that he could be there in 2-1/2 hrs in his C180 with 90 USG of fuel on board and if necessary could take off from the taxiway in front of his hangar, at night, with good knowledge of where to scale the fence to get in. If you knew him, you’d know he’s not joking. Interesting perspective.
Re ‘conspiracy theories’, there is a such a thing as broad alignment of interests among those with power seeking to expand it. All they have to do is hear and adopt the same narrative, no overt communication between them is required.
Off_Field wrote:
I was reading about some of the troubles in the south of italy with looting at food shops. An interesting point was that a number of people are employed on a cash basis so the government thinks are not employed and thus get no support packages. I wonder how what the scale of this is.
In the southern parts of Italy you’re the exception if you’re not paid in cash. This isn’t surprising and also – albeit to a much lesser extent – holds tru in southern Spain.
@Mooney_Driver, perhaps you should change your handle to Gloomy_Driver ? Just sayin’… ;-)
My take on air travel is that biz travel will fall pretty dramatically but leisure / ethnic travel will rebound. I guess we’ll see the final demise of First Class with a shrunk Biz Class and probably some sort of Premium Eco. That said, as the world’s purchasing managers will have to diversify their supply chain to outside China, expect to see lots of biz travel to places like Vietnam, Cambodia, etc, perhaps even Africa. Might even be beneficial for some African economies, who knows.
What’s surely out the window are the person-to-person meetings just to sit in the same room to watch a PowerPoint presentation. This crisis is different form the ones before in that it occurs in the age of apps like Zoom that really make remote meetings much easier and better even if you don’t have virtual meeting rooms equipped with the latest tech.
