Welcome to Travel Well with Allan Wright!
In this week’s episode, Allan compares domestic travel statistics from October 2019 and October 2020 as well as the total COVID deaths in the past seven days.
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Can’t watch the video right now? Here’s the video transcript of Travel & COVID-19 Statistics:
Hi, this is Allan Wright. Welcome to the Travel Well with Allan video update. Today I’d like to take a look into domestic travel demand as compared to how a country is doing with the coronavirus. And I’m looking at two different sets of figures in terms of travel demand.
We’re looking at domestic flights, actually, domestic demand for air travel in October 2020 as a decrease from October 2019. In terms of how countries are doing battling the virus, we’re looking at total deaths in the last seven days per million population.
Looking at that latter statistic, you can see that China, Japan, and Australia are doing quite well combating the virus within the last seven days, whereas Russia and Brazil are not doing well at all. The United States is doing terribly with almost 47 deaths per million people just within the last week.
When looking at domestic travel demand in October 2020 as a decrease from last year you can see that China is practically the same as last year, only a 1 % decrease. Russia is only 10%. Japan and Brazil are a 45% decrease which is quite significant. The U.S. is at 61 and Australia is 86.
Now there are some limitations here including the fact that the travel statistics were from October and the actual deaths are from the last week but in general you can find that there is no correlation between these two. And so the only way to get any good data from it is to look at it on an individual country by country basis. For example, Australia is doing quite well now combating the virus. They weren’t doing as well in October and they had significant very strict bans on travel between states and that reduced their demand dramatically.
You can look at China where their demand is quite high because they have been doing quite well combating the virus. If you look at Russia, for example, they’re essentially saying well the economy is our priority and health is not and there’s no need to worry about flying domestically. Go ahead.
In the U.S., we’re getting mixed messages right we have the CDC’s telling us not to travel and we have other folks saying essentially the economy is more important. But it is clearly having an impact that we are not doing well with the virus and our travel demand is still very low compared to last year.
So conclusions: if people are told they can travel and there are no restrictions, then they will. If people are told that they shouldn’t travel then they will reduce their travel quite a bit. And secondly, it’s also true that traveling people will likely spread the coronavirus in a place like Russia, probably contributes to the fact that they’re not doing so well. So when can we expect to return to normal in the travel world after we’ve conquered the virus.
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