Frankfurt is the Largest International airport hub in germany. Its the 14th Busiest Airport in the world. Ive never spent any time in frankfurt. In fact, ive never actually spent any time in germany at all, ever. But i have spent quite a bit of time in that airport because for whatever reason any time i have ever needed to go to the middle east or to that whole quadrant of the world i have always gone through and changed planes at frankfurt. A lot of middle east bound, north africa bound flights from the u. S. End up stopping in frankfurt. Its the only reason ive ever spent time there. The entity that runs the Frankfurt Airport has about 20,000 employees that they directly employ at that site. Airport operations there further support another 60,000 jobs or so. So that one airport in germany accounts for about 80,000 jobs. Financial times in london now reports that the entity that runs the Frankfurt Airport has instituted a hiring freeze and also started offering all staff at the airport the generous option of unpaid leave, which means congratulations, you can go home if you want and not get paid. Theyre also offering reduced hours to all staff at the airport. And the reason theyre doing that is exactly what you think. As described in the Financial Times passenger and cargo traffic at Frankfurt Airport have both, quote, slumped massively. And its not that germany is a particular epicenter for the Coronavirus Crisis. I mean case numbers in germany are rising rapidly, but theyre still only at about 53 cases which is fewer than the United States. The problem for the Frankfurt Airport is not specific to germany or specific to frankfurt or specific to that airport. Its that Global Transportation and the Global Economy is cratering. And if you just look at that one just as one example you can start to see the kind of economic fall out were experiencing all over the industrialized world. The Frankfurt Airport doesnt have it any worse or any better than any other International Passenger travel or shipping hub. But whats happening there with them not only hiring freezing but starting to send all their employees home, theyve got 80,000 employees at that one airport, thats a sliver of whats happening all over the globe. Right . And just follow any of the strands from that. Just as an example Frankfurt Airport happens to be a hub for the German Airline lufthansa. Its also started offering unpaid leave and has started reducing hours for all of its staff. And you can imagine what the knock on economic effect of that is. Its also started offering these lufthansa announced today they are cutting about a quarter of their short haul flights. The airline is grounding 23 of their aircraft altogether. In the past two weeks the stock price has dropped 23 in two weeks. And again not to single out lufthansa. Theyre no worse off than anybody else. Thats just whats happening to everybody. Thats a snapshot whats happening to the Global Economy. British air ways is also freezing hiring and cutting flights as is the european Discount Airline easyjet. Easyjet stock price down 27 in the last two weeks as well just like lufthansa. Here in america theyve canceled flights to china and starting to cancel flights to hard hit places like japan and singapore as well. Its happening everywhere. I grew up in the San Francisco bay area. And i remember as a little kid we once took a school trip where we all went in and rode the cable cars in San Francisco and they gave us the tour and showed us how everything works. And i remember it was very cool they showed you how they put these cable cars on these lazy suzens and swing them around in another direction. Its all burned into my mind. Its 40 years ago, right . But one thing that really stuck with me about that school trip i remember is when they showed us the braking systems for the cable cars i think its like squeezing the rails to bring the cable car to a gentle if squeaky halt for normal braking operations. But i remember they also showed us the emergency braking system, too, if the normal brakes werent up to the task or if they fail. And the emergency braking system as described to 6yearold me by a very cool very salty old cable car operator at the top of a veer steep hill in San Francisco the emergency braking system i remember him explaining was that if all else failed and the regular brakes didnt work and you really needed to bring this thing to a halt the backup system was that you could drop a big steel rod through the bottom of the cable car and it would go into a hole in the ground. And that would bring things to a halt in a most uncomfortable and sudden fashion if need be if nothing else worked. That was the emergency braking system for the cable cars as taught to me by a 6yearold. That appears also to be the braking system thats been applied to International Air travel with the Coronavirus Crisis. Its not like tapering off. Its just stopping. And its not like an american phenomenon. Countries all over the world are banning travel to and from specific countries or advising their citizens not to travel. As of tonight the state department and cdc have upped the warning for americans when it comes to traveling to italy. Excuse me. Im coughing not to make a point. Im coughing because i have a tickle. Excuse me. The state department is urging u. S. Citizens to reconsider travel to italy. The cdc is recommending travelers avoid all nonessential travel to italy. Theyve also tonight upped the warning for iran. Avoid all nonessential travel to iran. Were starting to see the first signs, too, it may not just be International Travel affected. For the first time amazon, gigantic company, three quarters of a million employees, amazon as of tonight is now restricting employee travel even within the United States. They had previously cut all amazon employees Business Travel to china. Now theyre restricting even Domestic Travel in the u. S. And so whether or not you care about the fate of the Frankfurt Airport or whether or not amazon employees are going to go to conventions or do whatever they do around the country, just extrapolate from those little economic stories to what we are seeing in terms of the Economic Impact of this crisis. You take a look at the front pages of various news sources tonight and what youre seeing everywhere is this cliff dive that american and International Markets have taken over the course of this week. All right, its front page news. It is front page news everywhere. The dow this week lost 3,500 points in total, largest point loss ever. The dow is down more than 12 over the course of this week. Other u. S. Major Market Indices look similar as do International Markets. But that plunge, that market plunge is not happening because of irrational fear of a virus, right . Its not happening because of just upset and volatility in an uncertain and poorly governed world. We really are because of this Health Crisis experiencing a very abrupt Global Economic shutoff. Jp morgan saying tonight they expect the Global Economy will contract, it will shrink for the First Quarter of 2020 because of this crisis. This follows on Goldman Sachs announcing yesterday they expect to see u. S. Corporate Earnings Growth drop to zero for 2020 again because of this crisis. So, yeah, weve seen the markets take this sort of garish sensational southbound turn, this plummet. But its starting to look like less of a, you know, just a phenomenon in the markets and more like the markets are a reflection of a major external event that is having very large real World Economic consequences to which the markets are just reacting and adjusting. Theyre a window on the problem. The markets themselves are not the problem. You know, this is not some incidence of traders mass psychosis. This is about an external event having very, very dramatic, far reaching, deep economic consequences. While the reach of the virus continues to expand today iceland announced its first coronavirus case. So did whales. So did bell aruse, so did lithuania and today mexico announced its first case and soon after announced its second case. And while china was the initial engine of this epidemic that no longer appears to be the case. We dont have that much visibility into china is arriving at the numbers theyre releasing about their death toll and about their number of cases, but if you sort of suspend any suspicion and even if you take them at their word china still announced today they diagnosed 327 new cases in the past 24 hours. Thats a lot of new cases in 24 hours but thats low for them given what the numbers have been. That said 327 new cases in china today pales in comparison with the biggest outbreaks outside of china. The biggest are italy, iran and south korea. Today those three countries between them announced 3,500 new cases. More than ten times the new number announced in china today. Again, 3,500 new cases in those three countries alone more than ten times the cases announced in china today. And in iran, italy and south korea those 3,500 new cases today, thats about double the new cases they announced yesterday. South korea is clearly dealing with a large outbreak, but the south korean government also continues to act very aggressively. Theyve got over 2,000 people diagnosed with coronavirus in south korea already. Theyre reporting hundreds of new cases each day. A part of the reason theyre able to do so is because they are very aggressively testing their population. Theyre testing thousands of people every day. South korea says between just yesterday and today they tested 12,000 people. And that mass testing in south korea is revealing the scale of the epidemic theyve got on their hands, but its also allowing them to identify infected people who then have to be isolated and monitored and if need be cared for. Now look at iran. Again, iran, italy and south korea are the three countries outside of china that have the largest outbreaks. In iran the news continues to get sort of spookier by the day because iran is a little bit of a black box. Iran announced today 34 people have died from coronavirus. It was 19 deaths two days ago, 32, and now they say its 34. But even that steadily rising death count in iran continues to seem out of step with numbers weve seen in other places and with the sort of ratio of known cases to known deaths thats starting to emerge as the pattern when it comes to this virus. After iran announced its official death toll of 34 as of today the bbcs persian Language Service announced they had contacted individual hospitals all over iran to check that official death toll, and according to their reporting when you go hospital by hospital according to the bbc the death toll in iran as of today is not 34 which was the official number but is at at least 210. Remember also that the outbreak in iran is believed to potentially be linked to religious pilgrimage site. And theyve closed schools and canceled events and gatherings around the country, but they havent shutdown access to those religious pilgrimage sites which brings thousands of people together in a country that now has what appears to be an outbreak of a highly transmissible disease. So south korea, iran, the other big country outside of china dealing with a major outbreak is italy. And in italy today the news was was bad. At the start of this week italy had announced 220 infections and 6 deaths. As of today theyre at 820 infections and 21 deaths. But get more specific in italy and look at the Lombardy Region which is where the outbreak seems to be centered. Reuters is reporting today circumstances there are dramatic. 345 people in the hospital, 64 people in intensive care. According to local officials in the hardest hit regions in lombardy, approximately 4 of the the entire population appears to be infected with the coronavirus in those hardest hit areas. 4 of the entire population. Local officials also say that thus far in that region each infected patient on average appears to be infecting two additional people. So think about that in terms of spread. If youve got 4 of your population already infected and everybody infected is on average infecting two other people, youre going to go from 4 to 12 to i mean that math is bad as is the outlook for just basic medical response and Disaster Response in that region. I mean, if theyve got 64 people in intensive care already and 4 of the population infected and on average everyone is infecting two other people, well, how many intensive care beds do you have . Almost 350 people hospitalized already. How many hospital beds do you have . The transmission rate for this virus, the number of people each infected person on average goes onto infect, and the fatality rate for this virus, the number of people who get this infection who die from it, those are our two algebraic variables here. These are the two mathematical bugaboos that have made people start using words like pandemic. And those are the two numerical factors that have turned this so quickly from a regional problem into a global cries. And were going to get some expert help on this in just a moment. But for perspective there have been other Novel Coronaviruss that have sickened and killed people in recent Human History including things like sars and mers which youll remember freak outs in the past 20 years. White house chief of staff Mick Mulvaney today gave a speech in washington, d. C. In which he lamented that the American Press is paying way too much attention to the coronavirus. Theyre only paying this much attention to it because theyre trying to hurt President Trump. To back up his argument he talked at length today about the sars and mers epidemics of previous years and he correctly pointed out that both sars and mers had much higher fatality rates than the coronavirus does now. As far as we know the coronavirus kills about 2 of the people it infects. Whereas with sars or mers it was 10 or even 30 . White house chief of staff Mick Mulvaney thereby arguing today that those were much more serious global crises, those were much more worthy of attention, those were much scarier. This coronavirus thing were dealing with now is not much to worry about. Why are you worried about this . This only has a 2 fatality rate. Again, well get some expert help in terms of understanding this in just a moment, but it doesnt take an advanced Public Health degree or Even High School level maths to see what is actually way less comforting of that analogy than mr. Mulvaney might think and what the white house should be propagating. For sars in total there were like 8,000 detected cases in humans. For mers there about 800 cases detected in humans. So between the two of them there were about 10,000 plus cases, there were fewer than 2,000 deaths. 10,000, 11,000 cases and fewer than 2,000 deaths. With what were going through right now weve already got over 80,000 infections and wave already got more deaths than mers and sars combined. And this thing is in 60 countries and climbing by multiple countries per day. And theres no vaccine, and theres no vaccine on the horizon. And theres no treatment and no treatment on the horizon. And everybody is infecting on average roughly two other people with 80,000 known infections already. And honestly when it comes to the fatality rate of coronavirus, there may not be a drug that treats it and cures it at this point, but because it causes in severe cases severe respiratory and pulmonary problem and it kills like 2 of the people we can assume some of the fatality rate from coronavirus will depend on whether or not people can get good medical care including access to intensive care units, including access to high Level Medical equipment like ventilators. And so, yeah, how many hospital beds does your country have in your state in your county . How many intensive care unit beds, how many ventilators . Thats going to make a difference. The fatality rate from coronavirus may end up averaging 2 , but it may likely be different from country to country. Depending on access to health care. Depending on the health of Health Workers in that country. As we move from tens of thousands of people who are infected now to hundreds of thousands people infected and potentially more. And so countries around the world try to figure out how theyre going to respond. In lebanon they closed all the schools today. In tokyo today they closed disneyland and a related Disney Resort called tokyo disney c. On the island of hokkaido which is the northern most island in japan where theyre supposed to be running the marathon and Tokyo Olympics this summer hokkaido declared a state of emergency across the island. In switzerland they announced nine new cases of coronavirus today. The government then ordered the cancellation of all events that involve more than a thousand people. Which among o