Airlines affected by COVID-19
For many reasons, world airlines are suffering from their own success. At the start of 2020 with more cities were connected throughout the world than ever before, but then COVID-19 that spreads like wildfire, hit the globe. The combination of the two factors has resulted in a world never seen before: empty. Abandoned city squares, monuments, museums, parks and especially airports point to a disconnected globe. The now disconnected globe means that the airline industry that relied on connecting the dots is grounded and airliners are being stored wherever there is space at airports. However, like all businesses, airlines still have bills to pay. Playing a crucial role in the global economy, the companies almost universally have asked their base governments to provide financial assistance in various forms, whether it would be government-backed loans, additional investment or potentially delaying tax payments, carriers begged for help. Lawmakers also realised the crucial role that airlines play in the well-being of the economy and were more than open to aid.
Unfortunately, low-cost carriers are often in a more compromised position than many of the traditional flag carriers. For all airlines, the COVID-19 lockdown in many counties throughout the world could not have come at a worse time because their customers are essentially banned from traveling due to government-imposed travel restrictions.
Even before the COVID-19 crisis will be even close to being brought to an end, maybe it is just about time to think about the changes that will be left to the to the world. Eventually we, at least those of us who haven’t succumbed to the disease or other complications from it, will emerge from the shelter of our homes and into the sunlight, blinking at the sudden brightness and the unfamiliar sensation of a breeze blowing against our skin, the sound of leaves rustling, or the chirping of the birds. The global moment of our various versions of incarceration have barely begun, but electronic media, print and online services are almost entirely consumed by bad news, dreadful predictions and dire forecasts about the march of COVID-19 across South Africa and around the world. Like any global event, this combined medical / public health / economic catastrophe is going to produce many outcomes. Just as there are many things we know, there are probably far more things that are unknown.
At a minimum, there are going to be dramatic effects on global commerce and economics. The great wave of globalisation over the past two decades, largely with China at its centre, has been shaken to the core. Shuttering a significant segment of Chinese manufacturing for several months, first with the shutdown of the city of Wuhan as well as the surrounding Hubei Province and then with the knock-on impacts to other major industrial areas, has had serious effects on the rest of the world. This was not simply because consumers and businesses could not access the production of Wuhan’s many factories, but also because so much global manufacturing now depends on supply chains that operate transnationally, with the inclusion of components and subcomponents from China, folded into production around the globe in thousands more industrial sites.
Under these current patterns, an army of producers elsewhere have had to scramble furiously to find alternative sources of supplies so that they could continue their own production of practically anything. Moreover, the production of thousands of finished items such as medical protective gear including masks and shields has been significantly shifted to Chinese plants as well. The resulting shock of this combined public health and economic crisis will change this, despite the seeming inevitability of the current shape of it all. But perhaps even more fundamentally, this crisis
will generate a major manufacturing shift in localising production of all kinds of products through 3-D printing. This is the kind of effort that is already producing some items on the multinational space station and for several industrial producers on earth. In fact, some rather clever folks are already 3-D printing ventilator valves, a crucial part of those medical ventilators needed in the current viral crisis.
Education will also be greatly affected as seismic shifts are coming at us quickly. Already, with schools and universities shut down around the world, instructors up and down the grade levels are experimenting with online teaching via applications like Zoom and WhatsApp. Libraries and art museums globally are making their virtual tours easily accessible and performing arts groups are making full productions available online in a variety of formats as well as publishers such as African Pilot.
Meanwhile, distributors are bringing a wealth of material available to teachers and students on a gratis basis. With the ongoing, enforced quarantining thousands of university students will be finishing their academic years via online instruction. One thing this crisis will do will be to open much wider the ability of students globally to participate in courses online, without the need to pay the astronomical fees the world’s top universities have been demanding.
Following the virtual collapse of the international air travel network, the utility and use of this instructiveness from education will increasingly flow towards the business and government spheres as well, given the significant cost-saving mechanisms they will become. As soon as clever people begin preparing video conferencing systems that have more and more of the verisimilitude of real meetings, without technological challenges and without the extensive costs and the bother of actual travel, the developers of really easy-to-use, cost-effective systems may become the next multi-millionaires. Advantages are when using such a system means users will not have to remove their shoes, belt, watch, change, glasses, wallet and cell phone while waiting for an embarrassing full body search by a bored airport security person again, unless they want to go somewhere really nice for a vacation. Of course, this will also come with the increasing surveillance of people in public places and on use-in-common transportation systems. Expect more intrusive biometric scanning for potential diseases,right along with ever-more invasive security scanning by CCTV systems. This will lead to a rich, new area of litigation over intrusions into one’s privacy and deprivation of human rights, as we head into a world something like what writers and filmmakers conjured up in works such as Minority Report. The current health crisis and all this data, of course, will lead to growing pressures for much stronger international accountability for disease outbreak reporting by nations in the early stages of an outbreak, as well as much stronger networks between nations and their public health authorities, rather than the more leisurely consultative relationships now common. This too may lead to compromises with individual rights, especially if such surveillance gives support to ideas about locking down a whole city, a region, or even entire national populations until an epidemic can be brought under control.
Persons who thought that polio, measles and other vaccines are a tool of the devil or are part of the plan that employs the New World Order’s black helicopter armies won’t like this, but after Covid-19, the global community, or at least enough of it, may be sufficiently shocked by what has happened to make it an international necessity of such monitoring anyway.
The effect on national economies by this latest virus is similarly going to be dramatic. The roller-coaster ride for stock markets globally (and their effects on savings, pensions, investments and investor mental health) may well push governments to figure out more stringent regulations, tripwires and halts in trading. Given the impact and magnitude of the government bailouts now being instituted, there may well be pressures for greater government ownership of significant blocks of shares of businesses being aided in order to protect the peoples’ investments, thereby reversing a decades-long trend towards privatisation as the best formula for growth.
Yet another part of the global economic debate appears likely to increase in intensity is whether an authoritarian system such as China’s (or to some degree, Singapore’s) is simply capable and more agile in responding to such dire emergencies than the distributed power of the American federal system or the divisive politics in Spain, Italy, France or Great Britain. If so, the push for greater government control over societal decision-making may begin to lean towards the Chinese model once again, especially if there should be yet another such crisis arising from yet another novel disease, or from a major economic dislocation, or, perhaps, even a major manifestation of the global climate crisis’s momentum.
This crisis is almost certainly going to have an impact on the world’s cultural and fashion spheres as well. We will undoubtedly see works about this crisis, in all manner of forms, ranging from contemporary reprises of some of the classics of plague literature, to the impetus for creative folks to find new ways to deliver their work, what with the closure of so many performing spaces and galleries around the world. The disease may well give birth to a whole body of work that explores all the ramifications of such a disaster visited upon humanity, its ideas of philosophy and about religion. Moreover, on a more quotidian note, just wait for fashion designers to work gloves and masks into their northern hemisphere fashion shows and clothing lines. Given the understanding that this crisis was probably the result of the migration of the virus from pangolins to humans when they were consumed as an exotic dinners speciality in central China, has given a new lease on life for the preservation of these peaceful but endangered ant- and termite-eating creatures. Out of the disaster, at least one small victory for the wildlife of the African continent, including rhinos and lions when the Chinese government halts the sale and distribution of Africa’s creatures in Chinese wild meat markets.