At Changi, one of the world’s great travel hubs, traffic plunged from 5.9 million passengers in January to a mere 25,200 in April — a 99.5 percent drop. The number of airlines serving the airport collapsed from 91 to 35. Two of the four main terminals have been temporarily mothballed; plans for a fifth have been set back at least two years.
“Industries that depend on travel, like aviation, hotels and tourism, will take a long time to get back on their feet, and may never recover fully,” warned Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
But travel is only one way that the coronavirus is disrupting global interconnectedness. The pandemic is interrupting the flow of workers, money and goods that increasingly bound the postwar world, helped to lift more than a billion people out of poverty since the fall of the Berlin Wall and delivered unprecedented stability and prosperity to much of the planet. To encapsulate: U.S. investment in China raised demand for soybeans that enabled Brazilian farmers to buy German cars. Continue reading.