Originally Posted by
sbrower
I am not saying that we won't see reopening and I am not saying that we wont' see some sort of testing in the future. But, for now, opening will NOT be based on testing. So, what you need is people who are willing to get on a plane because their perception of the overall risk of their getting sick is low enough that they are willing to take that risk. And that does exist, at some level. Until 30 days ago, I took the risk that I would catch malaria, yellow fever, rabies, hep A, hep C and about 1000 other diseases I didn't even pay attention to. So the issue is when enough people will believe that as a combination of: actual chance of getting sick; actual chance of getting badly sick; herd immunity; personal immunity; etc. all mixes together and makes it a background noise (just like the danger of letting an Uber driver take me to the airport).
Getting killed by terrorists on a plane is almost certainly going to turn out to be a much lower risk than getting and spreading this virus by the time 2022 comes around. And yet it took how long after 9/11 for the repeatedly government-bailed out US airline industry to see a return to pre-9/11 passenger counts? And Americans are still paying the massive bill for the US actions taken to try to make people feel secure to fly and do much more than just fly. Our national response to 9/11 and the time it took for passenger demand to recover will probably end up looking like a very fast recovery compared to what how it goes with this virus situation. In terms of passengers ‘ cost to travel by air, this virus situation may mean much higher international long-haul travel costs In a way that didn’t happen as a result of 9/11.