China Holds on to Zero-Covid as Cases Surge post-Golden Week

We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports across the world.

Looking at data up to 10 October:

• Global departures have stormed higher (+5.5% WoW), breaking the previous downward trajectory (Chart 1). This is likely a short-term blip, given that the change came outside the major airports we track.
• China (Beijing: -31.5% WoW; Shanghai: -12.2% WoW) departure numbers have collapsed with Golden Week now concluded; the effect was not felt around the rest of Asia (Charts 2, and 4). It comes as state-owned People’s Daily reiterated that China must stick with dynamic zero-Covid while big Chinese cities have upped testing. Notably, Shanghai has imposed new testing requirements for people arriving in the city. Excluding China, departures across Asia moved 0.5% lower WoW.

• Departures saw little change across the US (+0.3% WoW) and Europe (-0.6% WoW), as Heathrow Airport noted, they had the busiest European airport this summer, but the outlook for demand looks uncertain.

Information on long-term movements in flight data is available below.

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Head of Research at Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

Ben Ford is a Researcher at Macro Hive. Ben studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively.

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