Smart Globies

The pandemic has affected many different industries, one of which is aviation. The debt of the airline industry has surpassed imaginable levels (nearly 400 billion USD), banks are constantly asking for payment. The deadline to pay the huge numbers is by the end of the decade, or the bank has to stop lending and recover assets. Many airlines have to reduce ticket prices to attract customers, but it is difficult because of the fear of disease among many tourists.

Two years of Covid have messed up the system the airline industry uses to set ticket prices. Specifically, fares are usually based on the analysis of the previous year's passenger traffic, which is continuously updated based on passenger demand data. Right now, that store of information is completely empty and useless. The epidemic situation makes the only data we have is 2019, and of course it cannot be used to predict for 2022 or any other year.

“They will go blind if they rely on old data. Normally, the closer to the flight date, the higher the ticket price will be due to the urgent need to book flights, but that will not be in the current epidemic situation. Customers have to think very carefully before deciding to book or cancel a flight, they even have to do it months in advance,” said Oliver Ranson, former QCSC executive at Qatar Airways, who advises airlines. aviation on pricing policy.

John Harrison, a former Iberian revenue manager and now an employee of Cumberland Consulting, says low-cost carriers have a number of advantages in this situation. These airlines focus only on filling seats on simple routes, so they prefer to use real-time pricing systems, rather than data from the previous season. With a complex global network, they quickly attracted guests and won the game.

Storing information on computers is now 1% cheaper than it was 20 years ago, but unlike consumer companies, the airline industry has been slow to use alternative sources of information to predict demand. "What the airline industry is using is 20 to 30 years ago, it's the reservation system with the structure and data communication primitive," he said.

According to Ranson, alternative sources of information come in three main forms. The first is a social network, which allows them to raise prices, utilize reserves, and create popular new destinations. Next is credit card data, which shows when people started traveling, paying a lot for food needs, jewelry, theater tickets. The final type of information is from mobile phones and communication platforms like Zoom, the increased amount of time talking is indicative of customers' explosive travel demand soon.

Of course, none of this data comes cheap. The reason why the airline industry delayed innovating the way tickets was sold was because they had to deal with the operation and daily maintenance of the entire system. The above strategy is completely fine if placed in the time of previous years, but in the time of post-Covid recovery it is no longer effective.

However, things will soon change. The airline industry must soon adapt and develop to generate income if it does not want to go bankrupt due to debt.

Instead of keeping ticket prices low to attract tourists, the airline industry is upgrading ancillary services such as baggage fees, in-flight meals, aisle seats and flexible airfares to increase salary. These costs were initially offered on a ticket-specific basis, now customizable as a commercial product. The airline industry is trying its best to cover losses and avoid heavy losses caused by too low or too high prices.

Covid 19 has put unprecedented strain on the global aviation industry. Even if they don't want to, it will be the passengers who will have to pay to restore it.

New research by a team of scientists at Nagoya University (Japan) shows that the type of collinsella bacteria inside the intestinal tract may have helped reduce the number of deaths from COVID-19 in Japan and some other countries.

According to the Japan Times on January 14, in order to unravel the "mysterious factor" that helps some countries have low death rates from COVID-19, scientists from Nagoya University analyzed data on 30 types of cancer. gut bacteria in 953 healthy people in 10 countries through a public database.

The team analyzed the relationship between gut microbiota composition and mortality from COVID-19.



Applying an advanced machine learning model in February 2021 - a time when a COVID-19 vaccine was not yet available, scientists discovered that collinsella bacteria may be related to COVID-19 mortality.

The scientists divided the data into five types of gut microbial ecosystems. They compared them with mortality rates from 10 countries and found that people with higher levels of the gut bacteria collinsella had a lower mortality rate from COVID-19.

The study said that in countries with low mortality from COVID-19 such as Korea, Japan and Finland, the rate of collinsella among intestinal bacteria is often high, accounting for 34-61%.

Meanwhile, in countries with high death rates from COVID-19 such as Belgium, the UK, Italy and the US, the rate of collinsella in intestinal bacteria is only about 4-18%.

"I'm not saying that just one type of gut bacteria can treat COVID-19. The purpose of this study is to find a breakthrough in the treatment of the disease and to find something to do with that factor. The mystery leads to low mortality," noted Masaaki Hirayama, an associate professor at Nagoya University and leader of the research team.

Associate Professor Hirayama explained that collinsella bacteria convert bile acids in the digestive system into ursodeoxycholic acid, which has the ability to prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from attaching to receptors on cells and prevent "cytokine storms" (the type of overreaction of the immune system). immune system can be deadly).

"In fact, most Japanese and people from other Asian countries have high levels of collinsella and bifidobacteria," said Hirayama.