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What is happening with travel right now - and how to protect yourself in transport


Visualizing our dataset movement throughout the country

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Travel?

Short tip - do not travel. At least without much need.

Statuses :

  • Foreigners can not enter Russia until May 1.
  • Flights in Russia so far are carried out in almost full volume.
  • For canceled flights (and flights where the necessary stop is skipped due to quarantine) in most cases there is a loss-free return. In simply “disadvantaged regions” - alas, according to the standard scheme. The tours are worse.

Details are further, and there is a link to our very detailed instructions on how to live with it.

UFO Care Minute


COVID-19 — , SARS-CoV-2 (2019-nCoV). — , /, .



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There was a chance to lock the virus in China. Bad luck. Then there was a chance not to let the virus into Russia. Ours reacted very clearly, having closed the borders earlier than WHO began to aggressively advise it ( they started on January 28 ). Slowed down. Now proceed from the model that almost every country is infected ( 168 countries in the morning). Well, maybe, except for islands like Madagascar. Although Greenland is no longer a ride .

A good scenario might look like this - this is an expert opinion:
“According to Dr. Myasnikov, the epidemic will come to naught within a month, by mid-April. However, a second outbreak, according to a specialist, may occur in the fall. He called the panic around the pandemic unreasonable, but noted the importance of quarantine. The doctor suggested that the optimal quarantine period is one month. ”
Here is another expert opinion of the doctor about quarantine .

Here are the results of model development .

Here are the calculations of a bad scenario (this is not a scientific study, but the opinion of an expert based on data analysis).

That's about the speech of Rutte for the people of Holland, roughly speaking, about the fact that 60% of the population will be ill.

It’s far from the fact that everything will go just like that, but let's figure out what happens there. In a bad scenario, for the virus to stop, you need to get at least 60% of the population with immunity in any way. Then its spread rate will be lower than sufficient for the epidemic. Health care measures in this scenario focus on ensuring that not everyone gets sick right away, and the process lasts for years. Because those who get sick with free mechanical ventilation and an oxygen station in the hospital have more chances to survive than if 50 patients in serious condition fall on one mechanical ventilation device, and they will try to breathe oxygen in turn. The main step to smooth the curve is quarantine measures at the beginning, which will slow down the first peak. In addition, antiviral statistics will accumulate in the coming months,which could potentially reduce mortality due to complications.

Past epidemics of the MERS-CoV-type coronaviruses were slower in spread, and therefore quickly died out. More precisely, they were made so slow by a number of measures, including quarantine.

The second chance to get immunized is to get the vaccine before the natural “crowd immunity” is reached. Or hope for a miracle. A miracle did not happen, and there seems to be no ready-made mass genotype that is resistant to infection. That is, almost everyone is vulnerable. This, by the way, means that in China, with new foci of infection, everything can begin anew, but they already know how to smooth out peaks.

Now for the good. Fortunately, you need a lot of virions so that they gain a foothold on you and begin colonization. Fortunately, there is a chance that the virus will mutate toward milder symptoms, but it will do so slowly for years to come. Still, most cases for children and middle-aged people are not as scary as they seemed at the beginning. Mortality:


Age years



80+



70–79



60–69



50–59



40–49



30–39



20–29



10–19



0–9



China on February 11



14.8



8.0



3.6



1.3



0.4



0.2



0.2



0.2



0,0



Italy on March 9



13,2



6.4



2,5



0.2



0.1



0,0



0,0



0,0



0,0



South Korea on March 13



8.3



4.7



1.4



0.4



0.1



0.1



0,0



0,0



0,0




Here is a good post docadeptabout the spread of the epidemic and the severity of symptoms.

Unfortunately, there will be no vaccine fast. Now about 20 vaccines are in operation , but the most optimistic dates are not earlier than 2021 . Why is that? Because yes, tests are underway. The first test phase is efficiency. It will be finished pretty quickly. The second, very long one is security. You can’t joke with vaccines, it’s like “oops” in nuclear physics. You can not vaccinate half the world's population with what can give the most unexpected side effects. You can not give a vaccine if it is more dangerous than the risk of death at this age from a new coronavirus. Etc. Beta testing takes about a year.

We checked these arguments withMeklonand several more specialists. He will write separately what else is there, he has a large body of dissemination data. For example, about the fact that smokers in China died 14 times more often than people who did not smoke. We did this, in particular, because refinements are needed for the distribution model. UPD: here is his post .

For now, we can hope that the situation will go according to an optimistic scenario. Much depends on the first quarantine measures.

Quarantine for travelers


If you come from anywhere, go to quarantine for 2 weeks. Lock up and don't go out. Even throwing out the trash. Because within 24 hours after infection, you can start to give out viruses, and then symptoms appear.

This applies to everyone returning from abroad.

Lists of passengers seem to get local clinics and start checking for specific people. Here are the testimonies . It may be a call with a recommendation to transfer to a pancake diet. You will be remotely opened a disability certificate due to quarantine. Pick up after the end of isolation. Violation of the mandatory quarantine regime is fraught with fines and a potential term of 236 Article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. According to unverified data, they use the data of access cameras in Moscow, or monitoring the movements of the phone on the network with confirmation from the cameras.

If you are in contact with a quarantine patient (in the family, for example), you will also be given quarantine.

If you are not contacted, you can sit in silence, but it is better to warn the clinic. They will open a sick leave if you haven’t eaten a ticket. If you cough, stay at home. Otherwise, you crawl into the clinic, and it will be closed because of you. What's worse, if you tell your therapist about your trip and cough on him, he will also be quarantined. Here is an example .

Transport safety


If you decide to go somewhere, then remember:

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On average, in April there are now about 220 people on the train, 150 on the plane, 40-50 on the bus. This is our approximate estimate.

On trains, cleaning is done regularly. Here is a letter from the railways:
“Our trains carry out processing using disinfectant detergents that are active against viruses, both before and after each flight. In this case, special attention is paid to door handles and tables. In the wagons there are instructions on measures that should be taken to avoid infection. Our employees also undergo special training, work clearly and harmoniously, so that the trip goes comfortably. ”

In airplanes, cleaning is now done every cycle before boarding passengers (this is a protocol of flights to dangerous countries). WHO has updated requirements with IATA .

From the letter of Victory:
« , : 97–99,97%! HEPA- ( filter — High Efficiency Particulate Air Filter), , . , , .»

As lucky in buses, there are no uniform standards.

The most dangerous form of transport right now is standing trains, including the subway. Move only in masks, don’t touch your face, don’t touch anything around from objects, and even better choose a taxi, motorcycle or faithful military donkey .

The ventilation system in the train is arranged approximately like this:


Drew Sh.A.G.

This means that in one reserved seat or compartment there are very high chances of contracting from a neighbor if he is sick, and low from other people in the car. It is not necessary to seal the ventilation; for the most part, the virus will settle on the road. Here is the wagon load for the past week:


This means that in CB and soft should be the safest of all. Soft - this is where, in fact, individual coupes. Or if you can buy all the seats in the compartment, you should think about it.

Near the car’s air conditioner (or conditioners) there are blocks of UV lamps through which air is driven, so cleaning is done at the end of the cycle. Drinking water in the system also goes through UV. In an airplane, ventilation is arranged in a similar way (there is also a mixture of outboard air and a run through disinfection), but there are no private volumes like a compartment.

Toilets are more dangerous than the total volume (judging by the experience of measuring concentrations in hospitals in China ).

There is a study from China on buses- the doctors took the recordings from the surveillance cameras and found out the places where people who were infected from one patient were sitting. Firstly, not everyone near the patient was infected. Secondly, after 4.5 meters no one was infected. Thirdly, one person became infected half an hour after the patient came out (contact). Russian carriers now wash buses and apply other security measures, but there are a lot of them, so there is no general protocol. Evaluate before boarding.

The main symptom is a dry cough. Feel free to leave the bus at the nearest stop if someone is coughing. Move back. Wash your hands.

It is safe to drink hot drinks and eat hot food: at +56, the virus lives for no more than 10 minutes, and under UV radiation two(the study is about the past strain, but these properties should be almost the same). But the dishes themselves must first be processed before being applied to the head.

Here, WHO has collected some of the myths about the fight against the virus , very interesting. And this, the virus cannot be cured with antibiotics (because the virus, damn it!), The clinical antiviral efficacy of buckwheat has not been proven, toilet paper was sold out in China, in particular because it is great for masks when you are poor Chinese.

Here is another interesting, it is better to read the measures of WHO .
Here is an excerpt from there:
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The situation on our part is as a travel service


For us, it all started with the epidemic moving outside of China and entering Europe. There was a short period when the borders were not yet closed, but people were already checked with pyrometers. At this point, airlines gradually canceled flights.

Two weeks ago, we decided that security was more expensive, and removed all the advertising that might prompt us to travel, and asked our partners about it. We sell tickets for transportation within the country, but everywhere we show the current situation of the virus.

Then, one after another, the borders began to collapse. The call center was swept by a wave of cancellations. All the operators came out, but with 4 thousand calls a day, it’s difficult to quickly resolve everything. Because even at normal times, cancellation is a non-trivial process, but now it’s even more difficult. What is important is longer and only 60% percent is automated in principle. We are approximately 30% automated in these processes. Carriers are even worse; most of them got call centers at the beginning of the week.

The crisis team gathered.

On Monday, approximately 350 office workers moved to a remote location .

Airlines began to turn tickets into return tickets if the flight was to a country where borders were closed. Not without nuances: somewhere, anyway, with the commission, but the most adequate ones made a 100% return. Not fast, because the call centers either fell or were ready to fall (like ours). Unfortunately, on flights to countries where the borders are officially open, there were no such conditions for refunds. Ural has discounted flights to Milan.

Aeroflot until the last kept flights in the countries that were closing, in order to pick up our “abandoned” tourists. We extracted part of our employees from Europe precisely with their help.

Flights across Russia have been preserved and continue to be operated now. Traffic grew by about 3% by a rough estimate.

Buttons of trouble-free return under quarantine were added to your personal account, immediately threw all resources to automate this, so that the KC would not storm. All passengers of canceled trains were sent an SMS with a link what to do. To whom they managed to do it automatically (where the cancellation is without options), they instead sent an SMS with a refund.

We changed the IVR at the entrance to the call center for redirecting to instant messengers (we are rolling out to the front now) and a personal account.

They collected a lot of material about the situation and placed a link to it in the header on each page. Here we collect complete information. IATA leads a very good data page, on the basis of it several services are already being built for checking what is open and what isn’t, but they are all a little crooked - it’s important to understand that IATA speaks with a delay, and often there are documents that will close from such a date. There is no single source of truth, we are working on it.

Russian Railways made non-refundable rates refundable, here are the exact conditions .

We completely stopped selling tours.

Closed part of ticket sales.

On all schedule issues for those traveling outside the Russian Federation, we warn of the current situation.

They sent many SMS on cancellations to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, received a lot of strange feedback. People did not understand what was happening, they felt insecure, tried as best they could to formulate the problem in Russian. Example (cited with the consent of a person): “I’m now in Azerbaijan, everything is normal, not a problem. I personally don’t need it. So, I need to get 1 job to work. I have the kind of wealth besides that, my wife is left there, beckon me to come back possible. " Unfortunately, we could not help him.

To reduce the load on the call center, we are preparing to send letters even to those who have not yet canceled trains, but they are also nervous. Just a story about returns with a minimum penalty.

Added alerts on the English version of the site (but we closed sales there earlier). Each time you add alerts, you need to manually scroll through the cache, because even a 20-minute delay solves it.

As a business, we will survive the situation. But carriers, travel agencies, guides and all those who provide transport (including technically) suffer greatly. Some tour operators have already suspended payments .

The plans are to set up notifications to those who filed for a refund, but have not yet received it, that the process is ongoing. Finish processing returns for current dates and start working with those that come next week.

Now about the model. In Russia, everything is very dependent on transport, because there are many not very tightly connected parts of the graph. At the beginning of the week, we unloaded, restored up to 100% of the market and transferred to the Open Data Science community the dataset of people’s movements around Russia to calculate the model of infection in remote cities. Results are expected next week. Stay tuned. If you are a data scientist and want to help - write in a personalmephistopheies. Visualization at the top of the post was done just by ODS (special thanksSafronov)

Our great return instruction again.

The basic tactics from WHO are well described here . Please note that the reaction scheme is a bit like the flu reaction: you don’t need to hospitalize those who do not have “bad” symptoms.

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