I think any form of international travel, including Schengen travel, is in the same boat.

To your second question, no. They will not survive. We are going to see at least a few tourism dependent areas go completely broke and likely have some civil strife.

15 minute testing is already becoming available, and in my opinion will likely be the catalyst for some limited international travel to be possible. Tourists will be the last ones to likely get approved for international travel, but I foresee in late April or May testing begins for business and family/immigration travel to have restrictions lifted, but with the expectation departure and arrival testing plus self-quarantine restrictions. The best way to slowly get the travel industry back moving is to start some slow trials with essential travelers first, before you open the flood gates to tourism.

Anyone who thinks this will last until Fall, I don't think you quite understand the magnitude of travel being completely halted for months, and lockdowns continuing. It just can't happen without entire industries and even countries failing, and with current measures in place across the world, things will start to look better in a couple weeks time once the US and most Europeans countries peak and numbers start to fall. Sure, some poor 3rd world countries will struggle with it ,and their bans may continue until a vaccine is approved, but most governments will be going stir crazy wanting to open up travel to essential travelers, people wanting to be with loved ones, business and work travelers. It will cause a lot of social unrest if things continue the way they are now for too long. Governments have to balance safety not only from a deadly disase, but also safety of people having financial security.

Reliable test kits and copious amounts of them are the key to everything now. Until we have those (data), the enemy remains invisible and the lockdowns continue indefinitely. It's pure speculation at this point. We're completely behind in testing (Thanks CDC & FDA, love you too! :td::td:). Florida's currently testing ~6500 people (0.026% of the population) per day. I keep hearing of new tests approved, but not seeing them in the wild.

The larger problem for travel will be the changes made to business. As businesses have been forced to work remotely, for longer periods, they're re-tooling their workflow. I'm seeing more companies relaxing their rules regarding video conferencing, and finally seeing video conferencing being used between different companies. Up until now, video conferencing has been mostly for intra-company meetings. This is changing that. When things open back up, you're going to see video conferencing replacing what used to be in-person meetings. Not to mention many business' revenues have taken a beating during this time. They'll be looking to cut costs and travel is low-hanging fruit. Add to that the younger generations' familiarity and comfort with technology, I don't see business travel ever returning to its 2019 levels.

It bothers me how much emphasis is being put on finding a vaccine/drug for this, by both the media and medical community, as if once that happens everything goes back to normal. There is no 100% safe/100% effective vaccine/drug. We still don't have a vaccine for HIV, after 39 years. And there's been countless horror stories about various prescription drugs which caused far more harm than good. To quote one of my med school professors on the first day of class, "Half of what you will learn at this institution is wrong. The problem is that we don't know which half that is."

I wish I had a crystal ball or time machine to be able to look 75 years in the future, to look back at what is going on today and be able to ask, "Was it worth it? What were the right decisions? What were the wrong decisions?" Without large-scale, real data on the population (read: testing the majority of people, symptomatic and asymptomatic), any arguments about it today turn into emotionalism or political bickering. I think it may well be 50-75 years before a true objective answer can be ascertained.

The travel momentum that Instragram and the social media culture generated was tremendous, and brought economic wealth to foreign countries. I highly doubt the travel momentum will be what it once was of the 2019-2020 travel era, and all the tourism related business will never come back. People won't have the disposable income that they once had to support foreign travels.

Haven't booked any paid trips since this all started. Have booked several award trips speculatively (award space is relatively plentiful) for later in the year, with full understanding that they may not come to fruition.

This is where I'm at needing to balance health with economic decisions, it's a hard one but life will have to resume at some point before economies are not recoverable, the effects of that are far far worse than the virus.

The two are not mutually exclusive either/or. If you are hit hard with symptoms and are in bed or hospital for two/three weeks, your economic output is zero. If the healthcare system becomes overwhelmed because two many people are infected with symptoms at once, then the effect multiplies. Relaxing restrictions in order to avoid economic collapse could do even more damage.

If economies are damaged irreparably we could go into another global recession for years, in my opinion that will be far more damaging, do you remember 2008?

My point is that if you send people back to work and open up restaurants and bars, you'll quickly have a significant part of the population in hospital, or off work again, which will slam the economy. There is no black and white solution, it needs to be managed carefully. But going for herd-immunity is completely debunked.

I am feeling slightly depressed about how all this might play out after reading this article.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-c...long-term-plan

Not pleasant reading.

Very depressing yes but I don't think it takes account of developments in cures and treatments using anti virals or repurposing drugs which they are making good progress with.

I just don't understand the infection testing vs antibody testing.. I mean I understand it, but I don't know without antibody testing as well, what real information we are getting. I am sure I had it early March. If I was tested today, I would test negative. So what would that tell someone? That test doesn't know I've already had it. I could test negative everyday, unnecessarily being tested ( waste of testing).

Then there are those who haven't had it, and get tested today and test negative today, they might get infected after the test, and bam 2 days later are actually positive, shedding the virus.. Do we test people everyday??

Only testing those showing symptoms? We know many have it without symptoms ( read below to see that doesn't work), so that doesn't work. Testing everybody? Thats impossible. What does that even show, only the at that minute positives. Not the ones who will be positive tomorrow, nor those who have had it and recovered.

I am honestly trying to understand.Today on NPR the CDC Director, Dr. Robert Redfield, actually gave some sobering statistics regarding asymptomatic patients:



One of the [pieces of] information that we have pretty much confirmed now is that a significant number of individuals that are infected actually remain asymptomatic. That may be as many as 25%. That's important, because now you have individuals that may not have any symptoms that can contribute to transmission, and we have learned that in fact they do contribute to transmission.



And finally, of those of us that get symptomatic, it appears that we're shedding significant virus in our oropharyngeal compartment, probably up to 48 hours before we show symptoms. This helps explain how rapidly this virus continues to spread across the country, because we have asymptomatic transmitters and we have individuals who are transmitting 48 hours before they become symptomatic.

I agree.

Travel restrictions from state to state is a very new thing for the US, and one that seems to be expanding. My own home state of North Carolina has not restricted travel yet, but two of our counties have. Dare County which includes most of the Outer Banks set up roadblocks a couple of weeks ago and only allow residents into the county. Next door Hyde County followed a few days later but only as to Ocracoke Island, also on the Outer Banks. Unlike Dare, Hyde is not restricting entry to the mainland portion of the county. Dare and Hyde have no cases of the C-virus as yet. I read where Rhode Island is stopping cares with NY license plates and going house to house looking for New Yorkers. I also read where NY is talking about suing states that block entry of their citizens.

I could see a federal judge putting a stop to these travel restrictions within the US, but if not, at some point past the peak of the virus the restrictions will have to be removed. There will be economic pressure to do that. The Outer Banks economy is based on tourism and summer is their high season. The group that will be most economically vulnerable will be the owners of the many "mini-hotels", the 10 and 12 bedrooms homes that line the ocean front, which are virtually all rentals. Most of them do not cash flow now, or barely do so. People buy them on the "bigger fool" theory that a bigger fool will come along and pay an even higher price for them. The 2008 travel disruption just from the economic downturn led to many foreclosures of these houses, so the total ban for a couple of months in the spring rental market may send more of them over the edge financially. Anyone looking to buy such a property may have some good buying opportunities coming up.