The end of the world as we know it.

If you are, as I am a travel addict- these last two weeks have been a nightmare. The area I live in just put a shelter in place order so it will be at least three months before I can go anywhere. I was lucky I got to Japan when I did – for it may be sometime before I can journey back to the sacred soil.

The Corona Virus aka COVID-19 is a serious, and cataclysmic event. (And for the record, if you call it the Chinese Virus here – you will have your comment edited or deleted – consider yourself warned).

You know things are getting really bad when this happens:

Sources in Patttaya have confirmed tonight that the provincial government of Chon Buri, including the Bang Lamung district, has ordered that, from tomorrow, all entertainment venues must close until the last day of the month. The Pattaya News spoke with the Banglamung Police Chief this evening and confirmed the information. He says it’s a proactive measure to reduce the potential spread of the Covid-19 Coronavirus .

Pattaya has not reported a single confirmed case of the virus. ( That was as of the 17th of March). The total of cases in Thailand now stands at 411 since the virus first struck Thailand in January. (as of the 21st of March).

I think it is all because I was planning to go there in May. I was supposed to be in New Zealand right now as a matter of fact, but that evaporated at the beginning of last week. Over the previous five years, I have tried to visit the Southern Hemisphere four times. Only one of those trips happened, and it was an ordeal getting to South Africa. Of two trips to Australia and one to Namibia, they all got canceled for various reasons.

Approximately one person in 10 in the industrialized world works in a travel/tourism related industry. As this epidemic continues to spread, the travel industry is going to be decimated for several years to come, I fear. And thanks to the stock market collapse and the massive increase in the US debt coming from giving Steve Mnunchin a 500 billion dollar slush fund for his corporate cronies, I won’t have any money to travel anyway. My carefully planned timeline for retirement has been burned to the ground, and it appears I will be working for a lot longer than I intended to.

Airlines are in trouble, but here is the thing, some of this trouble they made for themselves.

But despite a history of rough patches during unforeseen events, such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the volcanic eruption in Iceland in 2010 that disrupted air travel, large U.S. airline companies spent most of their free cash flow over the past 10 years on share buybacks, propping up their quarterly earnings-per-share results.

So did aerospace giant Boeing US:BA, but to a lesser extent.

American Airlines’ $29 billion in debt and massive share buybacks are coming under increased scrutiny as the aviation industry looks for government aid to deal with tumbling sales from the coronavirus outbreak.

U.S. airlines, including Fort Worth-based American, have asked Congress for $58 billion in direct aid and low- or no-interest loans to keep business afloat as travel demand deteriorates amid increasing restrictions on public life to deal with the spreading virus.

But it comes after years of airlines stockpiling debt and spending billions to drive up stock prices through buybacks. American Airlines has spent about $12.4 billion on stock repurchases since 2014. Southwest has spent $10.7 billion buying back stock.

In other words, they could not be bothered to invest in their infrastructure or their employees. All while charging for bags, upgrades ( near and dear to my heart) and everything else under the sun. And don’t get me started on how they devalued their frequent flyer programs.

All of which makes me agree with Mark Cuban:

Singapore Airlines announced it is grounding 96 percent of its aircraft - a disaster because they represent the gold standard of customer service. But its unavoidable, Singapore is not letting anyone in. And with good reason. They still have free movement and they aim to keep it that way.

SINGAPORE - Singapore Airlines (SIA) will be cutting 96 per cent of its scheduled capacity till end-April after border controls around the world were tightened over the past week to stem the Covid-19 outbreak.

This will result in the grounding of around 138 SIA and SilkAir aircraft, out of a total fleet of 147, amid the greatest challenge that the group has faced in its existence, SIA said in a statement on Monday (March 23).

Its low-cost unit Scoot will also suspend most of its network, resulting in the grounding of 47 of its fleet of 49 aircraft.

And we should never forget, for the United States, this was all avoidable.

The coronavirus is the most foreseeable disaster in history — and so is President Trump’s inability to rise to the occasion.

There were scattered warnings before Pearl Harbor and 9/11 of what was to come. But nothing like this. My Post colleagues report that throughout January and February, the U.S. intelligence community was warning Trump that the pandemic was going to hit America. “The system was blinking red,” one official said.

But Trump wasn’t paying attention. “It will all work out well,” he blithely tweeted on Jan. 24 while credulously thanking Chinese President Xi Jinping for “working very hard to contain the Coronavirus.” (A British study suggests China could have eliminated 95 percent of its cases if it had acted three weeks earlier when a doctor first called attention to the epidemic in Wuhan.)

Because of Trump’s negligence, the United States lost two months of response time — precious days that should have been used to test the population, produce more N95 masks and ventilators, and build new hospital beds. This past week, the Pentagon finally announced that a Navy hospital ship would be heading to New York — but it will take at least two weeks to get ready. Why wasn’t the deployment order given sooner? Even now, with the crisis upon us, Trump hesitates to use his full authority to order wartime production of ventilators needed to keep thousands of patients alive.

Utterly lacking in empathy, Trump is incapable of rallying a shell-shocked nation. When asked on Friday, “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?,” Trump launched into a tirade against the reporter who asked the question. Like the snake-oil salesman that he is, his version of reassurance is to tout miracle cures that have not been verified by medical science.

I weep in anger and frustration imagining what might have been if Hillary Clinton — a sane, sensible adult — had won. We couldn’t have avoided the coronavirus, but we could have ameliorated its effects. We could be South Korea (102 deaths) rather than Italy (4,825 deaths and counting).

This evil man has to be removed from office.

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

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