Hi all, this post will be lengthy, but will eventually get to the specific Virgin situation...
i have a friend who is much more savvy than me. Today I discussed all this with them and now I have a slightly different view on how it is all going...
Travel is linked to many things - from capacity for tourism to border controls. What we are possibly witnessing is that each of the many countries around the planet are going through very different experiences with COVID. At one end are such nations as the USA, and almost of all of Europe, where this virus has escaped any control. Essentially they are already set on a path of great initial hardship, but they will emerge in a few months having overcome the hideous cost in lives this thing brings them. But on the other end, there are nations that have managed to contain this thing - China through to Australia. Through sheer success at social-distancing and so forth, they are managing to actually control this virus, but at the cost of future risk.
Given this, in just a few short months the world will be a radically different playing field. Both the USA and most of Europe will be past the nightmare stage, and essentially be open for business. But China and Australia and New Zealand will be still in essential lockdown.
Australia's success at containing the virus will mean that until a vaccine is available, we have to maintain various levels of lockdown. Which will mean that international tourism will cease to exist until such vaccine becomes available - and the real experts doubt this will be arriving anytime soon - estimates amongst them are two to ten years, if ever.
\There is a likely chace that within Australia that we will be able to relax restrictions on domestic travel relatively soon - but it will be a scenario without all the overseas travellers.
Even that may take anything around six months. And may be someone in government will start to really look at the numbers... Virgin is asking for billions to keep just about 2,000 people employed. What they are essentially asking for is not about those "few" employees. For a couple of billion we can. as a nation, start a completely new airline at that cost. Especially in an era where fleet and staff are in abundance at cheap cost....