U.S. Airline travel is rising... this is good for business but drives concerns about COVID spread. TSA tops 1 million passenger screenings for the first time since March https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/19/business/tsa-air-travel-coronavirus-pandemic/index.html Air travel appears to be on the rise after facing challenges from the coronavirus pandemic. More than 1 million passengers were screened by the Transportation Security Administration on Sunday, according to the agency. Airport screenings reached a total of 1.03 million people, the most since March 16. But that's still down from the same day in 2019, when 2.6 million people were screened through TSA checkpoints. Since the pandemic hit, US airports have screened fewer than half of travelers than the same time last year, according to the CNN Business Recovery Tracker. TheTSA also reported another pandemic high: The agency screened 6.1 million passengers nationwide last week (October 12 through October 18). That's the highest weekly number since the coronavirus pandemic began. The recent bumps in passenger screenings could be a sign that more people feel safe to travel, though cases are once again on the rise across the United States, with more than 48,000 new cases reported yesterday, according to Johns Hopkins University. So far it's been a tough year of losses for the airline industry. After federal aid expired in October, both United Airlines (UAL) and American Airlines (AAL) announced job cuts totaling 32,000 airline employees. Concurrently, US airline revenue has plunged roughly 86% from last year, topping $12 billion in combined losses during the second quarter.
As if to underline the airline risks.... we have this story from today. Texas woman died of coronavirus 'on the jetway' on flight from Arizona “It became difficult for her to breathe and they tried to give her oxygen,” an official said. “It was not successful." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-woman-died-coronavirus-jetway-flight-arizona-n1243957
While the virus will attack a patient quickly during the “cytokine storm phase”, this almost always happens to patients in the later stages of the disease. For this lady to be healthy enough to travel and board a plane, her death was caused by other factors, not listed but mentioned in the article. Probably a heart attack. Her Covid diagnosis was after the fact and had little to do with her death. I personally can’t imagine flying commercial during this regardless of what the media says. However, this is just fearmongering.
You are so wrong, heavily in denial. There are tons of previously healthy survivors who can confirm they got Covid and it almost killed them.
With Covid you don’t go from asymptomatic, walking, boarding an airplane to dead in 2-3 hours during a flight. You can go from asymptomatic, to symptomatic, then to the ER, then to the ICU without recovery but it usually takes a MINIMUM 2-3 DAYS. Edit, here’s a quick read for symptom timeline https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-covid19-day-by-day-symptoms-patients-2020-2?op=1 If she was that sick she should have never been let to board the plane. Not to mention this happened in July? Another late positive test autopsy, listing Covid regardless of the actual cause of death.
An interesting article on retail supply chain issues... Why everything from furniture to diet soda is so hard to buy right now Shoppers are still finding many items — heat lamps, refrigerators, laptops, and more — on back order. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/21509105/back-order-furniture-heat-lamps-appliances-supply-chain You don’t appreciate how indispensable your refrigerator is until it stops working. When Slomique Hawrylo’s Kenmore fridge broke down in mid-August, she realized this is especially true during a pandemic. At first, Sears quoted her two-and-a-half weeks to deliver a replacement — already a long wait for a five-person household — a date the retailer pushed back once, then twice, then three times, until she was looking at sometime in October. After an expensive experiment with dry ice, she bought a dorm-size mini-fridge to tide the family over. It wasn’t much help, though. “I mean, once you put a gallon of milk in the refrigerator, that’s it,” she says. “So we found ourselves going to the store every day, we found ourselves eating out every day.” Eventually, she gave up and canceled the order, finally tracking down one of the few available models at a local Lowe’s. “It was a humbling experience, to be honest with you,” she says. It’s also a familiar one during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nearly seven months into the pandemic, people across the US are still finding themselves thwarted from purchases due to empty shelves or months-long back orders. While toilet paper may no longer be a scarce commodity, the supply of new bikes hasn’t yet caught up with the cycling boom, and dumbbells continue to see the kind of resale markups usually reserved for limited-edition Air Jordans. Now, as Americans get ready to hunker down for a projected next wave of the virus — or settle into masked and distanced school and work routines — they’re buying up a whole new range of products to prepare. Retailers are struggling to keep up: Wayfair had sold out of nearly its entire selection of patio heaters by mid-September as people snatched them up for safer outdoor gatherings. School districts are facing shortages of Chromebooks, leaving tens of thousands of students without laptops for online learning. Big-box stores can’t keep enough furniture and appliances in stock to fill the homes where their customers are now spending so much time. The disruptions are everywhere — and with the busiest shopping season of the year still ahead, experts say more delays are inevitable. If it were merely an issue of quarantine fads and a shift from offline to online shopping, these problems might have a quicker fix. But behind every sold-out product, there’s a vast supply chain linking raw materials to factory floors to distribution centers, and the fallout from the pandemic is impacting them in ways we are still coming to understand. Many of the shortages we see now are the direct result of decisions made six months ago, says Rafay Ishfaq, an associate professor of supply chain management at Auburn University. In April, retailers looked at the growing economic and human toll of the virus and adjusted their purchase orders accordingly. At a time of record unemployment, it was understandable to think Americans might be inclined to buy less. “Imagine a big-box retailer saying, ‘Let’s hold off. Let’s see where things go, and then we will restart [the supply chain].’ That’s what’s happening,” he says. When retailers told their suppliers not to produce more, those companies told their suppliers not to produce more, setting off a chain reaction. As lockdowns eased and people started shopping, however, there was no switch anyone could flip to ramp back up to a pre-pandemic pace. “It takes time to gather that momentum and get this global supply chain or even the domestic supply chain going,” says Ishfaq. “For the producers to start making things, they need demand planners and merchants and the retail firms to tell them how much they need.” While it may seem obvious from today’s vantage point that restrictions on indoor gatherings would lead to a run on outdoor heaters, that was hardly the case back in the spring. When Walmart placed its orders for fishing tackle earlier this year, it estimated that 25 million Americans would be fishing regularly. None of its forecasts predicted that number to jump to 35 million as lockdowns propelled interest in outdoor recreation. Now, looking ahead, there’s no historical data to model whether people will still be scrambling to buy inkjet printers and chest freezers next April, or whether, by then, there will be a whole new “new normal.” Plus, says Ishfaq, even if retailers could meet every spike in demand at a few weeks’ notice, it’s not necessarily worth it for them to do so. “Every retail chain is focused on their big sales items: what they sell most, what they’re known for, what the customers come to the stores to buy,” he says. “If that means that the peripherals or seasonal items or secondary product categories run short, then so be it.” This is especially true when manufacturers are dealing with supply chain issues of their own. Fans of Coke’s or Pepsi’s more esoteric soda flavors — Diet Mountain Dew Code Red, Cherry Vanilla Coke Zero — have found them out of stock for months as the companies prioritized their “high-volume” products. Like other beer and soft drink makers, they’ve also had to contend with an aluminum can shortage — a consequence of consumers suddenly drinking at home en masse rather than at bars or restaurants, where most beer comes from a keg — as well as earlier disruptions in the supplies of artificial sweetener (imported from China) and carbon dioxide (produced as a byproduct of gasoline, for which demand plummeted this spring). It’s not just beer and soda cans that are harder than usual to come by. Sales of canned food and home canning supplies have soared during the pandemic, and while the leading can manufacturer, Ball Corporation, has ramped up production at two US plants and begun construction on another, that extra capacity won’t come online until the latter half of 2021. Even that’s a better timeline than most: Paper towels are out of stock at many retailers, but “producers have no plans to build new manufacturing capacity,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The central piece of the machinery needed to make paper towels takes years to assemble.” Transportation bottlenecks are another culprit in the back order bonanza. Early on in the pandemic, US imports plummeted and shippers canceled planned voyages from countries like China, anticipating lower demand. As economic activity picked up and Americans tore through retailers’ inventory of standing desks and roller skates, freight couldn’t keep up: Ships were filled to capacity, leading to congestion and delays in ports. Months later, importers are still struggling to find shipping containers to send certain goods, and when they can, it’s costing nearly three times as much to ship from East Asia to the US’s West Coast as it was pre-pandemic, according to the Freightos Baltic Index. Shipments are also less reliable, and those delays and costs get passed along to the consumer. “Transportation has a limited capacity,” says Simone Peinkofer, an assistant professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University. “There are only that many containers that fit on a ship or number of products that fit on a truck, and thus, if there is not enough transportation capacity, then products will take longer to reach their destination.” Stateside, the effects of Covid-19 have exacerbated a shortage of truck drivers, caused by the industry’s decades-long failure to increase drivers’ wages and benefits to reduce turnover. With workers retiring or changing careers in droves, companies aren’t able to recruit or license new drivers fast enough to meet increased demand. Steven Melnyk, a professor of supply chain and operations management at Michigan State University, says we’ll be feeling the effects of many of these disruptions for months — and in some cases years — to come. One threat he expects will eventually trickle down to store shelves is supplier bankruptcies. In July, the International Monetary Fund warned that the bankruptcy rate for small- and medium-sized businesses could triple this year due to the pandemic, potentially destabilizing the supply chains they support. “Many companies are just going to disappear,” says Melnyk. “Why? Because if they file for bankruptcy and then they decide to reconstitute themselves, they have a 25 percent reduction in their ability to secure a loan from a bank because they previously declared bankruptcy. So guess what they do? They just shut the door.” These so-called “silent bankruptcies” are already underway: One amusement ride manufacturer told the Washington Post that many of its suppliers in China and South Korea have simply stopped returning messages. In some industries, such as aerospace, suppliers may be highly specialized and therefore hard to replace when demand returns, says Melnyk. “When they go bankrupt, you don’t have a supplier. And it takes time for you to find an alternative and qualify them and develop them and vet them and integrate them.” Even if the market for children’s rides seems unlikely to see a sudden surge in demand, those companies, in turn, support a network of other businesses that could crumble if orders dry up — subcontractors who make specific components, suppliers of raw materials and manufacturing equipment, transportation and logistics companies, and so on — making a quick rebound even harder. In the shorter term, the holiday shopping rush is going to be a test of Americans’ patience. A recent Salesforce report found that as many as 700 million packages could face delays if online orders exceed shipping capacity by the expected 5 percent. Shoppers could also see fewer bargains on Black Friday, says Melnyk. While retailers usually compete on price during the holidays, this year, “The issue is going to be availability. … You might see some discounts but they’re not going to be the crazy discounts we’ve seen in the past.” For those who have their eye on fitness equipment, a new guitar, or a working refrigerator, the question may not be, “Where can I find this on sale?” but rather, “Can I find it at all?”
So true. My trails (yes, my trails... ) in the Rockies are just filthy now with Millennials and their gen-alphabet kids, doing their epic stunts and yolo tricks, with their gopros and selfies and public music (on a wilderness trail?) and lamentations about why they see so little wildlife.
The ruling is thought to be first time a restaurateur has succeeded in such a lawsuit. In similar suits, some have been dismissed and many are still pending. Durham restaurant owners successfully sue their insurance company for COVID-19 losses https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article246735656.html Two Durham restaurant owners have prevailed in an insurance lawsuit that could have implications throughout the nation’s struggling hospitality industry. Giorgios Bakatsias and Matt Kelly, whose restaurant groups include some of the Triangle’s most prominent places to eat, sued their insurance provider, Cincinnati Insurance Company, earlier this year, arguing that North Carolina’s COVID-19 shutdown order should be covered by a businesses interruption claim. Durham Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson agreed, ruling earlier this month that the losses should be covered, a figure expected to be significant, as it includes months of operations for 16 different restaurants. According to the University of Pennsylvania,which has tracked similar lawsuits since the start of the pandemic, Bakatsias and Kelly are the first owners to win out of more than 1,200 cases. Most decisions are still pending, but more than a dozen other cases have been dismissed. “We’re thrilled with the outcome,” said Gagan Gupta, lead attorney for the restaurants in the lawsuit. “We believe Judge Hudson came out on the right side of the issue, that his decision was thoughtful and well-reasoned. ... Small businesses and restaurants are struggling all throughout our state. We hope and believe (insurance) is a really important piece of the puzzle as businesses seek to navigate the financial pressure of this moment.” In response to a request for comment, company spokesperson Betsy Ertel said that Cincinnati Insurance plans to appeal the decision, arguing that the coverage is meant only for lost business due to property damage. Cincinnati Insurance Company has until Nov. 11 to appeal the ruling. “We continue to believe that business interruption coverage under our property policy in this case does not apply because there was no structural alteration to the property,” Ertel said in a company statement. “The prevailing view by courts around the country has been that an economic loss alone doesn’t qualify as direct physical damage or loss to property, which is the trigger for business interruption coverage.” AN ORDER TO SHUT DOWN Early in the pandemic, North Carolina and other states shut down restaurant dining rooms as one of several measures taken to slow the spread of COVID-19. Judge Hudson’s ruling hinges on that government order, reasoning that Kelly and Bakatsias were unable to fully operate their restaurant properties, even now as the state has reopened dining rooms at 50% capacity. Gupta declined to offer a general figure for what the claim is worth, saying that damages would be set after the appeals process, if the ruling is upheld. “Whatever the damages end up being, they are significant,” Gupta said, pointing to hundreds of restaurant workers losing out on thousands of customers over the past seven months. “There are revenue losses, but also losses to the communities (the restaurants) touch.” In April, as the long-term impacts of the COVID pandemic were beginning to come into focus, North Carolina Insurance CommissionerMike Causey wrote a letter to business ownerscautioning that business interruption claims were unlikely to be successful. “Standard business interruption policies are not designed to provide coverage for viruses, diseases, or pandemic-related losses because of the magnitude of the potential losses,” Causey wrote in the April letter. “Insurability requires that loss events are due to chance and that potential losses are not too heavily concentrated or catastrophic. This is not possible if everyone in the risk pool is subject to the same loss at the same time.” In the letter, Causey said that losses for businesses of 100 employees or less could be between $220 billion and $383 billion each month. He expressed sympathy for business owners and said his office would pursue legislative solutions for lost revenue. “This type of loss could cripple the insurance industry causing many companies to fail,which would put the protection of homes, automobiles, and businesses at risk,” Causey wrote. “We can’t legally force insurers to cover a risk which they didn’t intend to cover and which, in some instances,was specifically excluded in the policy.” As the first case to win this kind of judgment and as the coronavirus cases escalate nationwide, Kelly and Bakatsias’ win signals a path to the other side of the pandemic for a restaurant industry that’s endured a bleak year. ‘THIS DEFINITELY GAVE US SOME HOPE’ Kelly said he felt a range of emotions following Judge Hudson’s ruling, that he was happy and excited to have won, but that largely it represented hope for his restaurants. “At first you definitely have hope for yourself, that you have some support so your businesses can make it out on the other side,” Kelly said. “As restaurant owners, we’re navigating businesses that probably aren’t going to be able to open under the current conditions. This definitely gave us some hope.” Together, Bakatsias and Kelly own more than a dozen restaurants, including Mateo, Saint James Seafood, Kipos, Rosewater and others, many among the Triangle’s most acclaimed restaurants. This is the second time in as many years that Kelly has filed a business interruption claim, the first stemming from the April 2019 Durham gas explosion, which closed his Saint James Seafood Restaurant for nearly a year. Saint James was open 39 days before it closed again due to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We want to make it through to the other side,” Kelly said. “What few jobs there are left in restaurants, we want to keep those jobs. A big part of my career and livelihood, along with so many restaurateurs, chefs, servers and cooks definitely dangle on this decision.” Kelly and Bakatsias said the court’s decision will sway whether or not some restaurants are able to stay open, including their own. North Carolina restaurants have been able to open dining rooms at half capacity since May, though many have stuck with takeout service only. Kelly said those sales are a losing battle. “Right now as we’re talking, people are having conversations about whether they’re going to open up their restaurant tomorrow or not,” Kelly said. “I hope it gives hope to other policy holders. Because, I’ll tell you, to-go does not pay managers’ salaries. To-go doesn’t cover rent. To-go does not work.”