Fortune

The 2018 flu season is on its way to being the most severe since 2014-2015, when an estimated 56,000 Americans died, according to the CDC.

This is the first in 15 flu seasons in which 49 states (Hawaii was the exception) reported “widespread flu activity” in the same week for three weeks straight, the CDC reported. Puerto Rico also reported widespread flu in weeks two and three.

“The first [notable characteristic of this season] is that flu activity became widespread within almost all states and jurisdictions at the same time,” Dr. Dan Jernigan, director of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on a conference call Friday morning. “The second notable characteristic is that flu activity has now stayed at the same level at the national level for three weeks in a row with 49 states reporting widespread activity each week for three weeks.”

“We often see different parts of the country light up at different times, but for the past three weeks the entire country has been experiencing lots of flu all at the same time,” Jernigan continued.

While flu rates in states like California, which has seen high rates of hospitalization, appear to be declining, the 2018 flu season may not have reached its peak yet.

“Hopefully we’re in the peak currently, since the data is a week behind, or that it peaks soon,” CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told CNN. “Regardless, there is a lot of flu activity happening across the country and likely many more weeks to come.”

This season, 6.6% of doctor visits and hospitalizations have been flu-related, according to the CDC’s FluView, the national baseline is 2.2%.

“This is the highest level of activity recorded since the 2009 pandemic, which peaked at 7.7%,” Jernigan said, referring to the 2009 swine flu outbreak.

The 204-2015 flu season peaked at 6% of doctor visits or hospitalizations being related to the flu. During that season, 710,000 Americans were hospitalized with the flu, and over 34 million Americans contracted the flu.

This season, the elderly along with baby boomers (ages 50-64) have been hit the hardest. Thus far, the flu is being blamed for the deaths of 37 children; 148 died from the flu in the 2014-2015 season.

Here is what you need to know about the 2018 flu season and how to protect yourself, your family, and your dog.

Investors got royally spooked this week when United Continental unveiled shocking new plans to do precisely what airline-watchers fear most: Flood the market with lots of new seats. And they’re absolutely right to freak out.

Airline costs are rising on autopilot, but revenues are flat, already putting a squeeze on profits. To thrive, the industry needs constantly rising prices to blunt the relentless, big, inflation-plus escalation in costs. But United’s salvo threatens to scuttle the optimistic scenario long embraced by investors, the belief that airlines had entered a new era of maturity and profitability.

During its Q4 earnings call on Tuesday, the brass at America’s third-largest carrier announced a campaign to raise capacity (that is, its total number of seats), chiefly at its mid-continent hubs at Denver, Chicago O’Hare, and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental, by an astounding 4% to 6% annually, during each of the next three years.

Over the next three days, United’s shares ual fell from $77.97 to $65.66, a decline of 16%. And the news badly battered its three major rivals, pummeling American Airlines shares aal by 9.6%, and pounding Delta dal and Southwest luv by 7.8% and 7.3% respectively. All told, the combined market cap of the Big Four shrank by 9.7%, falling from $133 billion to $120.1 billion.

A ‘kick in the teeth’

“It was an amazing reversal, because everything was going so well for the U.S. carriers before that earnings call,” says Kevin Mitchell, chief of the Business Travel Coalition, a group that lobbies on behalf of corporate travel customers. For years, the industry has taken the position that consolidation is a great thing for forestalling price wars. Money managers and the airlines’ chiefs have praised the big carriers’ newfound “discipline,” defined as extreme caution in adding new seats in their big markets. Investors also took comfort in the industry’s campaign to protect its highly-lucrative, often antitrust-exempt trans-Atlantic routes by blocking the onslaught from discount carriers Norwegian Airlines and WOW of Iceland, as well as Gulf Qatar and Etihad of the UAE.

The new Tax Cuts and Jobs act also raised kudos. The industry predicted that fatter paychecks and a surge in cash that could swell corporate travel budgets would fill the skies with hordes of new leisure and business travelers. “Then came the kick in the teeth no one expected,” says Mitchell.

On the Tuesday earnings call, United president Scott Kirby acknowledged that because the airline hadn’t grown capacity at its major hubs, it hadn’t been able to benefit from a recent surge in potential customers, missing out on growth by losing business to low-cost competitors. The main beneficiary, Kirby said, was Southwest, a powerful rival in Chicago, Denver and Houston. Kirby-renowned in the business for squeezing maximum revenues and profits from a web of routes and hubs-shocked the Wall Street audience by declaring that the only way to beat the discounters was to match or better their prices.

The call had barely ended before Gary Kelly, Southwest’s CEO, promised a powerful counter-attack. “We have the tools we need to continue to perform well in all the markets that are impacted,” declared Kelly. He added that United was attempting to recover business it had ceded during a lost decade of financial travail, capped by a troubled merger with Continental. Regaining those that lost business, said Kelly, “will be a very, very hard battle.”

Chasing Southwest

Indeed, Southwest benefits from the lowest cost structure among the Big Four, and could maintain strong profitability amid falling prices. But the same isn’t necessarily true for American and Delta, and especially United.

To understand why, it’s crucial to study how the favorable trajectory of revenues and costs that powered the airline renaissance is now reversing. Let’s start with United. For 2017, United’s operating revenues rose a decent 4.4%, but its costs, excluding special items, waxed by almost 8%. The two big culprits were the categories that comprise over half the airline’s expenses: compensation and fuel. The former rose by a formidable 7.5%, the latter by 19%.

Although 2017 was still a pretty good year, United lost altitude. Its operating margin shrank from 13.6% to 9.7%.

The forces buffeting United are also threatening American and Delta. What’s certain is that their compensation will keep rising rapidly and fuel is likely to follow. Hence, the industry must keep strongly increasing revenues to remain profitable. But over the past two years, revenues have barely budged. The U.S. carriers’ dramatic comeback is mainly due to a gigantic decline in fuel costs that, for now, has run its course; it’s not due to curbing costs or achieving sustainable gains in revenues.

To get the full picture, let’s look at American, Delta and United as one big airline. Their peak came in 2015, when declining fuel costs supplied a tailwind by boosting pre-tax profits around $25 billion. But since that summit, the airlines’ performance has been fading. From 2015 to 2017, the combined revenues of American, Delta and United were virtually flat at $120 billion. Yet compensation rose over those two years by 18.9%, and even though fuel prices costs in 2017 were 6.2% lower than in ’15, expenses still rose at a rate that far outpaced revenues, growing at 7.8%.

The conclusion is that the biggest U.S. airlines can’t stand anything that shrinks the top line. The aftershocks of United’s adding a lot more seats, and the Southwests and Spirits responding by slashing fares to fill their planes, is highly unpredictable. “Lower fares mean more people will fly,” says Mitchell. “But it’s possible that the price cuts will be so deep that they’ll more than offset revenues from additional passengers.” It’s that uncertainty that’s roiling the airlines. As for the much praised “new era” of rigor and sense, the United announcement sends a stern message: Don’t count on it.

Howard Schultz dumped the equivalent of a double espresso into an otherwise humdrum Starbucks earnings call on Thursday.

In response to an analyst question about tax law, the Starbucks executive chairman detoured into a stream-of-conscious monologue about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

“Well, I think I have another question for you: Twenty or so years later, and the question is, the issue of do you understand and are you anticipating what could happen with cryptocurrencies? And the reason I mention this is not because I’m talking about Bitcoin, because I don’t believe that Bitcoin is going to be a currency today or in the future,” said Schultz, without explaining his pessimism.

After panning Bitcoin, the longtime coffee godfather elaborated by saying the promise of blockchain--a software technology that creates a decentralized, tamper-proof ledger--would soon result in a trusted “consumer application” for digital currency.

Schultz hastily noted that Starbucks isn’t creating a digital currency nor investing in crypto assets. But he then speculated that the emergence of a “legitimate” digital currency would depend on retail stores.

“I personally believe that there is going to be a one or a few legitimate trusted digital currencies off of the blockchain technology. And that legitimacy and trust in terms of its consumer application will have to be legitimatized by a brand and a brick and mortar environment, where the consumer has trust and confidence in the company that is providing the transaction,” he said.

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Schultz then brought up his earlier “clairvoyance” about “the Internet and e-commerce and the Amazon effect of things”--in order to suggest (you guessed it) that Starbucks was in a unique position to capitalize on the impending era of blockchain.

He wrapped up by requesting that the call’s participants not to ask the company’s CFO “lots of questions about this, because this is not something that’s in our model.”

Then, as if Schultz had not said anything, the call returned to ordinary analyst patter about income and tax strategies, leaving befuddled reporters wondering what the odd interlude was all about.

Some Starbucks observers may speculate that Schultz, who has been one of the most visionary corporate leaders in recent decades, was sketching out early plans to make the coffee company a pioneer in blockchain. Others might suggest Schultz switch to decaf.

You can find a transcript of his remarks, which came towards the end of the call, at SeekingAlpha (registration required).

The 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just wrapped up a short time ago. Here are a few things I learned over the past week during this gathering of globally minded leaders, thinkers, builders, connectors, and teachers.

1. The mental health disorder time bomb is upon us.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I was fortunate to participate in a powerful discussion on mental health on Wednesday, sponsored by the nonprofit Kaiser Permanente. When taken together, mental, neurological, and substance use (MNS) disorders are the world's leading cause of disability, according to the 2016 Global Burden of Disease study, which is published annually in The Lancet; they're responsible for one in every 10 lost years of human health. But "despite this, most people with a mental disorder do not receive minimally adequate care," says Pamela Collins, a renowned expert on global mental health issues at the University of Washington and a former top official at the National Institute of Mental Health. Blame the above, in part, on the stigma and shame that is still--irrationally, unfairly, and cruelly--associated with mental illness; blame the rest on a lack of recognition of the diseases in question, a lack of understanding, a lack of funding, and a lack of access to care. But whatever the reasons may be, the harm of hopelessness is being felt everywhere and in greater amounts--from the widespread burden of depression to steadily increasing suicide rates to the alarming epidemic of opioid misuse. A study of Kaiser Permanente's own care system, indeed, showed how pervasive and unrecognized mental health issues can be. KP CEO Bernard Tyson told our Davos panel--which also included Collins, the University of Cambridge's Tine Van Bortel, and KP's mental health leader, Don Mordecai--that in nearly a third of primary care visits for patients presenting with physical symptoms, the underlying cause appeared to be related in some way to a mental health issue. Throw into this mix the coming deluge of age-related disorders like Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as populations around the world get grayer, and you have a fast-growing burden of mind and brain disease that will fall heavily on both national healthcare systems and family caregivers. This was also a key point brought up in two more health sessions I moderated this week--one on the so-called "value" paradigm in healthcare and the other, a fascinating conversation about aging with Dr. David Perlmutter, dean of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

2. Cars won't just be autonomous in the near future, they may also be burning in the street.

At Marc Benioff's annual Salesforce lunch in Davos--one of several hot-ticket events the company hosts at the Swiss gabfest each year--five seers from industry and beyond offered visions of the future...in three minutes or less. Joe Kaeser, CEO of Siemens, had one of the starker (and darker) predictions, warning that we will likely "have either the best society ever built"--with a happily "completed Fourth Industrial Revolution"--or one of the angriest: a world with bitter, left-behind citizens and "the biggest trade war we've ever had." There will be "no middle ground," he said. "We'll not only have self-driving cars, we'll have burning cars." Kaeser, who leads a company with more employees than Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook combined, said the new economy must find worthy and essential roles for the untold millions of current workers who will be disrupted out of their jobs when the age of AI, robotics, and digi-everything fully arrives. "We have to figure out what to do with our people," he said.

3. Everybody loves blockchain.

The World Economic Forum shuttle buses that ferry meeting-goers from hotels to the Congress Center and back are rolling vessels of small talk in a Babel of tongues. It's a reminder of what a missed opportunity it is that we Americans aren't required to be proficient in anything but English. (In Switzerland, a land of four official languages, nearly two-thirds of citizens speak at least two of them every week.) But in this polygot melting pot of business pooh-bahs, government grandees, and media loudmouths, there was one English word I heard over and over: "blockchain." And yes, it came up in one panel discussion after the next. The bottom line? Everyone is excited about blockchain technology, naturally. Most would be hard-pressed to tell you why.

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