The antidote to virus panic is in the hands of entrepreneurs

‘It’s a ghost town,’ said the officer manning the body scanner at Manchester airport — Manchester, New Hampshire, that is, a city of some 112,000 citizens. I don’t know how many of them would normally be passing through its departure hall on a Sunday morning, but today there are no more than 50, plus me and a bottle of hand sanitiser to remind us why it’s so quiet.

A spokesman for the global airline industry says carriers collectively foresee worst-case revenue shortfalls of $113 billion as a result of virus fears and travel restrictions, similar to what hit them after the 2008 financial crash. Flybe, already a sickly patient, is our own first fatal victim — allowing Rishi Sunak to drop Budget reforms to air passenger duty that might have helped keep the regional carrier alive. Meanwhile, US airline chiefs whose shares are being hammered and planes are flying near-empty can hardly have been reassured by a recent audience with Trump and Pence. The President continues tweeting seven stupid things before breakfast about his great response to the outbreak, while international medical opinion says limited early testing and confused messaging in the US has so far amounted to the least effective action among developed nations.

So I’ve picked an interesting week to visit eastern states, beginning with a wedding party in Vermont, where a rural economy based on timber, apples and cheese feels as unglobalised as it’s possible to be. And yet guests have flown in from the UK, France, Vancouver and Hong Kong, among them a manager of a worldwide conference business that’s staring into the abyss and a builder of billionaire superyachts who says, with embarrassment, that his industry expects to be as untouched by this crisis as it was in 2008.