Thirty-sixth Entry

Wednesday, April 22th, 2020

One-third of Covid deaths in the US have been in New York City.
Local funeral homes are ten times busier than usual, and running six to eight weeks behind. The refrigerated morgue trucks keep humming.  

A few days ago, I heard that 70% of restaurants in the US might go out of business—hard to imagine. New York City has an uncountable number of restaurants. I also heard that restaurants are an $860 billion industry in the US and sales have dropped about 85% – not as bad as the airlines, which say they lost 95% of their business. Apparently, even with scheduled flights reduced to about 30% of normal, only one in ten seats are filled. If restaurants were open and available, like air travel, it’s hard to guess how many seats might be filled—probably not many. After 9/11, the airlines were down 50%, and it took several years for them to recover.

Military readiness is “significantly reduced” as all aircraft carriers have been called into port.