EasyJet expects to operate no more than 10% of its flight programme between January and March amid strict travel restrictions.
The budget airline said its revenues plunged 88% at the end of last year, with turnover slumping to 165 million, PA Media reports.
It flew just 18% of its normal schedule in the three months to the end of December, which saw the second English coronavirus lockdown and tighter curbs on travel.
The Luton-based carrier also confirmed that 1,400 UK jobs were cut as it slashed its workforce by up to 30% to reduce costs to weather the crisis.
But the group said it is planning for a surge in “pent-up demand” for travel once restrictions begin to lift and as vaccinations are extended.
A World Health Organisation-led team investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic left its quarantine hotel on Thursday to begin fieldwork, two weeks after arriving in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus emerged in late 2019.
The team boarded a bus and departed the hotel shortly after 3 p.m. local time (0700 GMT) without speaking to journalists, Reuters reports.
Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP
In Vietnam, thousands of factory workers will be quarantined after a cluster of Covid-19 cases were discovered in the north of the country – the nation’s first locally transmitted infections in almost two months.
Vietnam announced earlier that it had confirmed two community cases in the northern provinces of Hai Duong, where a factory worker tested positive, and Quang Ninh, where an airport worker was also found to have the virus. One of these infections has been linked to the more infectious strain of the virus found in the UK.
Since contact tracing measures were rolled out, 82 more cases have been identified. Most are concentrated in Hai Duong, where one village has been placed under lockdown.
The country’s health ministry said it will collect tens of thousands of samples for testing, while social distancing measures have been introduced.
In Quang Ninh province, all schools and educational institutions, including kindergartens and universities, have been shut until at least the end of the week. Large gatherings should also be minimised, and meetings avoided where possible, officials in the province said.
Vietnam has managed to avoid the very high case numbers seen in many countries around the world, due to its early and effective use of contact tracing. The country has also imposed restrictions on entry, while any citizens who return home must stay in quarantine facilities. Since the start of the pandemic, it has recorded 1,633 cases and 35 related deaths.
You know that daydream where you suddenly come into a vast fortune? You could buy a castle or a tropical island hideaway, help out all your friends, do a bit of good in the world. But what if it was a truly incredible sum? What if you had $1tn to spend, and a year to do it? And what if the rules of the game were that you had to do it for the world – make some real difference to people’s lives, or to the health of the planet, or to the advancement of science.
A trillion dollars – that’s one thousand billion dollars – is at once an absurdly huge amount of money, and not that much in the scheme of things. It is, give or take, 1% of world GDP. It’s what the US spends every year and a half on the military. It is an amount that can be quite easily rustled up through the smoke and mirrors of quantitative easing, which is officially the mass purchase of government bonds, but which looks suspiciously like the spontaneous creation of money. After the 2008 financial crash, more than $4.5tn was quantitatively eased in the US alone. All the other major economies made their own money in this ghostly way.
And it is not just governments that have this kind of money. Two of the world’s biggest companies, Microsoft and Amazon, are each worth more than $1tn; Apple stock is valued at $2tn. The world’s richest 1% together own a staggering $162tn. That’s 45% of all global wealth. At the start of 2020, private equity firms held $1.45tn in what they call “dry powder”, and what the rest of us call “cash”: piles of money sitting around awaiting investment. Just imagine what you could do with it.
Since the coronavirus hit, as after the 2008 crash, money has suddenly been found. Tens of trillions of dollars in economic stimulus packages are being chopped up, partitioned, allocated, siphoned. What if we could spend that cash? If only we could divert some of it, scrape a bit here and there from governments and banks, or quantitatively ease $1tn into existence and spend it before anyone noticed. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine what we could achieve:
