March 18, 2020

USA Resolve - Surviving Crises Together

While self-isolating as advised by pandemic experts, I am thinking about how the United States is a unique group of immigrants seeking opportunity in a free land. Americans are tough survivalists; many of our television shows reflect those traits! We “survive the test of time” by working hard together to succeed. As before, we will learn, discover, innovate and emerge stronger from our experience.

For perspective, we compiled prominent natural, man-made, and health disasters facing the USA since TRIPinfo.com 1996 launch. Ironically, there have been 24 huge scares in 24 years!

YEAR FATALITIES DISASTER
1996 230 TWA Flight 800, Long Island, NY
1996 220 ValuJet Flight 592, Florida Everglades
1997 0 Global Economic Scare, DJIA drop from 7,715 to 7,161 (7.8%)
1998 223 United States Embassy Bombings in Tanzania, Kenya
1999 271 Midwest and Northeast Heat Wave
1999 217 Egypt Air flight 990 crash, off Nantucket, MA
2000 0 Y2K century rollover technology scare, DJIA drop from 11,497 to 11,357 (1.2%)
2001 2,996 September 11 terrorist attacks, stock markets closed for 6 days
2001 265 American Airlines Flight 587 crash, Queens, NY, 2nd deadliest air crash in U.S. history
2001-2002 0 Dot-Com Bubble collapse in tech stocks, Nasdaq drop from 5,048 to 1,139 (77.4%)
2005 1,836 Hurricane Katrina (FL, LA, MS, AL, GA, KY, OH), costliest U.S. natural disaster, $125B
2005 120 Hurricane Rita (LA)
2005-2012 658,507 HIV/AIDS pandemic peak, shown is total USA fatalities from 2005-2016
2008 112 Hurricane Ike (TX, LA)
2008-2009 0 Economic Crash and recession, DJIA drop from 14,164 to 6,594 (53.5%)
2009-2010 18,036 H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic
2010 13 Deepwater Horizon Offshore Rig Explodes creating largest oil spill in U.S. history
2011 348 Super Tornado Outbreak, 360 tornadoes in Midwest & Southeast
2012 158 Hurricane Sandy, Most of East Coast, USA
2016-2017 107 Orlando, FL + Las Vegas, NV mass shootings
2017 2,982 Hurricane Maria (Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Caribbean)
2017 106 Hurricane Harvey (TX, LA), tied with Hurricane Katrina as costliest U.S. natural disaster
2019 34,200 Influenza (common flu) A + B virus deaths, among 35,500,000 known cases
2019 150 Corona Virus Covid-19, among 8,883 known cases in U.S., as of 6:35pm EDT, 03.18.2020

Speaking from very personal experience, certain things reliably occur following initial shock of scary events:
  1. Life goes on and gets back to normal, thanks to a lot of hard work by dedicated travel industry professionals!
  2. Frightening medical issues are contained over time by dedicated doctors, scientists, and health care workers.
  3. The financial scares always prove the least fatal, and often have the quickest bounce backs to previous highs.
  4. Inevitably, another Big Scare will come along, averaging it seems once/year, incessantly covered by news media.
We watched repeatedly as disasters made time - and travel - stand still...regionally, nationally, or globally. Following each, pent-up demand from “down” time always resulted in travel bounce. Online leisure group trip planners we serve plan 4-18 months in advance. We are proud to steadily provide our audience reliable reference they need, that has stood the test of time.

Our sincere thanks to our ever-growing audience and supporters. Stay Safe, and do what the health-care professionals request. And don’t forget to thank Roger Dow, CEO of the United States Travel Association, and all the dedicated industry leaders that work to represent your industry in time of need. We wish normality returns to you sooner than you expect!

Safe Future Travels--
Mark Browning
Founder, TRIPinfo.com


Copyright 2020 TRIPinfo.com. All rights reserved. From https://www.tripinfo.com.

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