Thread by @contrarhetorics

That's the problem with the worldview here. National quarantining is just an idea. Not a concrete logistical consideration. How many people who take international holidays can afford an added two weeks of quarantine at their own cost? They'll need to get used to the idea. 1/20

https://twitter.com/RizaHawkeye8/status/1317853820404125700

Or maybe the state should pay for those two weeks in food & accommodation for every person who wishes to travel internationally? What a sterling use of taxation resources. Much better than them being spent on anything to do with health! Easy enough an idea to get used to? 2/20

But before we go on with tourism, let's look at trade. Since commercial flights are actually integral to international trading. As a rough rule, between 40-50% of air freight is typically carried between nations in cargo holds commercial flights. 3/20

Not only has this often proved a cheaper and faster in terms of air freight delivery, it also alleviated the core global logistical fact of there being not enough cargo airplanes in existence to carry the amount of air freight that moves between countries. 4/20

Expanding air cargo fleets after a certain point becomes too expensive in cost-benefit terms given the duration it takes to recoup the highly expensive costs of ordering the manufacture of new cargo planes. 5/20

It can make evident sense in the face of demand to expand a fleet but it is not keeping up with the amount of demand that drives the decisions directly. There are actually advantages in the opposite - in underservicing & maintaining value through market scarcity. 6/20

Given the rolling crisis of back-jamming in distribution chains caused by the collapse of commercial air flight, airline companies have taken to passengerless "ghost flights" carrying only cargo. But there isn't enough cargo space to make this profitable. 7/

"Ghost flights" aren't being done because they remotely make up for lost commercial flight profit. They are mostly being done because (a) airline companies simply have to in part to keep siphoning off the pressure toward a terminal breakdown in trade & ... 8/20

... (b) they need to keep aeroplanes in service operation condition so that fleets don't mothball while this all goes on. So this can't last 8/20

What they could do is gut their commercial airliners and refit them as full cargo planes. But once they do that, that's it for future passenger conveyance capacity. So it locks in permanently depressed tourism. 9/20

Tourism forms 5.5% of New Zealand's GDP. Indirect value to businesses is about an added 4.8%. Even more centrally for core economic strength though, it composes 21% of foreign exchange earnings, making it the biggest export industry the country has. An "inessential" sector. 10/20

You can cut the direct GDP in half at a most generous estimate based on 14 day quarantines acting as a permanent depressor on demand & a permanent inefficiency on supply. 11/20

And it's supply which matters most of all in getting at the pyrrhic nature of national quarantines. In order for the 14 day quarantine system to truly work, it evidently requires quarantining not just commercial travelers but all the flight staff, crew and pilots too. 12/20

There are obviously not enough pilots to allow this to happen. Much like the idea cinemas can keep running forever selling out empty 9 seat buffers at the cost of 1 ticket, commercial air travel cant survive on limiting flights to whatever 14 day quarantines allow. 13/20

So pilots & flight crew will have to be exempt, as indeed, they already are. This has been a massive hole in quarantining ongoing & accepted all through this year, showing what pure political performance #IronDan's ire over "travel bubble unvetted" New Zealanders is. 14/20

Too, even when pilots, crew & staff are housed in hotel quarantine for their stopovers before return flights, they aren't kept in aspic. They have exposure to the members of the domestic population that service their stay. Vice versa, they're exposed to those members. 15/20

Eventually, you might suppose, all involved in airline travel around the world might get the virus and be immune. But this assumes a steady state of employment. And this is where flight *staff* become particularly important. 16/20

Flight attending is already a high turnover profession. It'd only grow even higher due to the wear of the constant quarantines. So there is no homeostatic state that will involve those who fly between countries eventually become a workforce staffed only by the immune. 17/20

But above all, the most crucial point may be this. National quarantining relies on presupposing the same herd immunity it's built on terror doesn't exist. Since there'd be no end to quarantine without it. Its obvious presumption is that the pandemic eventually *will pass*. 18/20

If the fearmongering for why natural immunity can't be trusted to build is true - that cases of reinfection mean "there's a risk" of no herd immunity and/or that people with individual immunity can still reacquire viruses & retransmit them - this is a permanent problem. 19/20

Unless (or until) they learn they have not, in fact, been "successful" at suppressing C19, I can see that one of the most difficult obstacles in nations like Oz and NZ will be their desire to believe quarantine, combined with their distant island geography, ... 20/20

.... can free-ride their entire populations beyond the global herd immunity threshold. An atavistic resetting over & over to the idea they can ford through the pandemic in "national arks". Even New Zealand is not so much of an island it can escape being part of the Earth. 21/21