The Travel Pass

We have already speculated, here at "The New World," that in the new world it will be important to be able to prove you've been vaccinated.  The current conventional wisdom seems to agree, but how that will be done is still an open question.

Whatever we end up using to indicate our vaccination status, it won't - and shouldn't - be issued by the government, according to an Axios summary article on the topic (although, oddly, no reason is given). We will get a government-generated card, but it is, apparently, so easy to forge that it will be useless for anything but reminding you what kind of vaccine you got and when your next shot is due.

 Who cares if you've been vaccinated?  "Your employer has a clear interest in knowing whether you've been vaccinated."  So do immigration officials in countries you travel to.  The tourism industry is very interested in "restoring confidence in travel and mobility," and this is not likely to happen if travelers can't prove they've been vaccinated - and therefore aren't dangerous.  Want to go to a concert, or a ballgame, or get past the bouncer at a club?  Show your card.  Overall, "those who get vaccinated deserve more freedom."

There are some objections:

The federal government "should discourage the use of vaccination cards or apps for virtually any purpose other than guiding individual medical care," argued Duke University professor Nita Farahany in the Washington Post.  "Vaccine cards (and immunization apps) could turn into powerful weapons of exclusion and discrimination," she wrote.

Well, yes, they could.  But if they, and the vaccine, are provided to everyone, in a fair and just manner, they could very well be what gets people like my wife and I out of the house.  How about you?

Meanwhile, "the International Air Trasport Association (IATA) is in the final stages of developing a digital COVID-19 vaccine passport for travelers."  It's the IATA Travel Pass, a name that should give Dr. Farahany the chills ("Show us your papers!  Do you have a Travel Pass?  No?  Come with me!").  Actually, "the main priority is to get people traveling again safely."  The Travel Pass includes your COVID testing, as well as your vaccination, status, and "will incorporate four open sourced and interoperable modules which can be combined for an end-to-end solution."

There.  Doesn't that make you feel better? 

You OK?

 It's Christmas.  Well, almost.  Merry!  And happy any other holiday you're able to celebrate.  Next Christmas:  the new world!  

And it's also the eight month anniversary of this blog.  It's been a long trip, and it's... what... half over?   Maybe a little less.  If everything goes well.

How you holdin' out?

Unplanned, Unwanted and Born into Poverty

We've already talked about the baby boom, and twice about the baby bust.  The bottom line seems to be that women in more developed, more well-off countries, who have more options regarding family planning, have put off pregnancies until the world becomes saner, safer and more predictable.  Women in less developed, less well-off countries have been cut off from family planning services and birth control, due to lockdowns and the general economic shutdown, and are getting pregnant in record numbers.

Now the BBC reports that in the Philippines, around 214,000 unplanned babies will be born next year.  In the before, about one in three were unplanned.  2021?  "It could be as high as probably half of the pregnancies next year unplanned."

The Catholic Church "is encouraging procreation with the verse: 'Be fruitful, and multiply'."  And the mostly-Catholic citizens of the Philippines are strongly warned against abortion.  In the words of Rovelie Zabala, a Phillippina who is pregnant with an unplanned and unwanted baby:  "I continued [the pregnancy] rather than committing a sin."

Wherever we stand on abortion, we need to understand that, around the world, there will be millions of children born next year who were unplanned, are largely unwanted, and, for the most part, born into poverty, in countries that are trying to recover from the pandemic and are in no way ready for a spike in the birth rate.  

We better off, wealthier folks in developed countries really need to decide how we'll respond to this.  This is a world where there's enough for everyone to be safe, and healthy, and have prospects for the future.  How do we make that happen? 

Deja Vu

I suppose we should not be surprised to discover that:

As wealthy governments race to lock in supplies of Covid-19 vaccines, nearly a quarter of the world's population - mostly in low and middle-income countries - will not have access to a shot until 2022, according to a new analysis.

The detail is all there.  It's more of the same depressing unbalanced equations:  

Japan, Australia, and Canada reserved more than one billion doses*, though these three countries combined did not account for even 1% of all current cases.

There is some good news - the WHO has established an initiative it calls COVAX, which, among other things, will attempt to purchase and pool billions of doses and make them available to poorer countries.  The bad news is that they are not meeting their goals at this point; they are short $5 billion.  The US - whose expenditures on the pandemic are measured in trillions - announced in September that it would not participate in COVAX.

Surely someone could find $5 billion in the couch cushions.  Not just because it's not fair or just for people to continue to die because the country they happened to be born in got passed by.  But also because we all live on the same world, and the virus doesn't care what country you live in.  Meaning that this pandemic will not be over until enough people have been vaccinated to achieve herd immunity worldwide.  

Which means none of us gets to the new world until everybody does.  And when we get there, will the inequality that so characterized the before be even more pronounced, as poor countries (and, for similar reasons, poor neighborhoods and poor states) struggle to recover from horrifically spectacular economic and public health devastation that richer countries either bounced back from, or didn't experience at all?

It looks like the new world could easily be even more unequal and unjust than the old world. But we've seen that before, haven't we? 

 * - Out of a total of 7.5 billion doses available worldwide at the time of  publication.

UPDATE - 12/22/20:  Good news, apparently.  Somebody's searching the couch cushions.

Social Trauma

An article on the CNN website got me thinking.  It's about how friendships and relationships have suffered during the pandemic, and the different politicized responses to the pandemic, and the political divide over assigning the responsibility for too many deaths. 

We've all experienced, first- or second-hand, conflicts over the extent to which others keep themselves and those around them safe.  We've seen the pictures of crowded bars and heard of individuals who haven't gone out of their houses since March.  The simple act of wearing a mask unleashes a Byzantine web of rules and beliefs and codicils and dogma.  And we've at least heard about countless encounters that have exploded into vitriol and violence, between the adherents of one set of rules and another.

The article focuses on how this landscape of conflict has affected and often ended relationships and friendships.  We tend to gravitate toward others who share our cultural values, and it seems certain that a vast number of us form connections only on the basis of these somewhat superficial connections.  So when we are each required to act in a deeply fraught environment, we discover depths in the other we had never known.  Who knew she would value personal freedom to choose over the safety of others?  Who knew that he would stay home when everyone else was going to... and so on.  And all this is not to mention the relationships which have suffered from safety-based unwillingness to meet face-to-face.

This is social trauma on a huge scale.  Will these relationships - many of which have been declared permanently over - heal, and regrow, in the new world?  If not, how will that change the social landscape?  Will we be more wary, probing our prospective partner's deeper beliefs and motivations before making stronger commitments?  And if they do, for the most part, heal and grow, will we forget about those simmering depths that we know nothing about?

The ideal new world would be a place where we talk, and listen, about the important things, in case we have to act on them again. 

Not There Yet

We've seen the signs.  Not the land, but the signs.  They tell us that the land is real.  It's ahead of us.  The long sea journey will have an end.

Diego who, we have established, is an idiot, wants to jump into the sea and swim to land.  "It's real!  It's there!  We've done it!  Come on!"  I might have joined him, but instead I went to see Francisco, the master, the man with the maps.

"Hola, Francisco!  We've seen the birds!  We've seen the branches in the water!  The sea is... different.  So - how much longer?"

Francisco turns slowly, eyes me, and sighs.  He glances at a map in front of him.  "We're halfway there," he says.  "If the wind stays fair."

Great news about the vaccines, great drama as the first doses are administered.  But it's not time to leap off the ship and swim for land.  Experts estimate that we won't be returning to "normal," meaning, generally, no more masks or social distancing, anywhere from August, to next fall, to next winter.  And that's always with the caveat:  "If everything goes right."

So we are, at best, halfway to the new world.

Settle in.

Economic Recovery?

 As soon as it gets light each day, I search for signs of land.

Every day, there is news of vaccines - technical, distant, abstract - and news of more and more deaths - also distant, and in many ways abstract.  Now we hear, in yesterday's Washington Post, that Operation Warp Speed is apparently on impulse power:  of the 300 million doses promised, less than one tenth will actually materialize anytime soon.  Grit teeth.  Trim sails.  Keep looking.

But the economic news - long term, at least - is different.  Although the only legislative body capable of providing economic relief to Americans has chosen not to, and the non-eviction orders of earlier this year run out in less than a month, and America has so far not added nearly enough jobs to make a big difference to Americans in distress, there is a growing consensus that once the vaccine is distributed widely enough, allowing businesses to open safely throughout the country, the economy will spring back to normal, or better than normal, as early as the second quarter of 2021.

Kevin Drum explains why the 2021 recovery will be stronger and faster than, for instance, the slow recovery* from the 2007-08 financial crisis:  demand.  When businesses re-open, there will be customers lining up around the block.  Personal savings have gone through the roof in 2020, since so many of us haven't had the opportunity to spend disposable income, and we don't have to buy gas if we're working from home.  Once everything opens up, it will be a seller's market.

Drum also notes that the TARP program, which was cobbled together by the outgoing Bush Administration, was diluted by a skeptical Congress.  It ended up providing a lot less stimulus than this spring's CARES Act, which had some significant simulative effect, and there's a good chance that something further will be done, if only after January 20, to provide more relief.

We'll see.  

 * - Of course, the major financial institutions bounced back pretty quickly, but the rest of us?  Not so much.

It's a Card

It's a card.

But it seems it's just a way to help you remember which vaccine you got, and when to get your second shot, or something like that.  It's not entirely clear.  But it's early days, still; anything could happen.

Sorry it wasn't a tattoo.  Oh, well.

PS:  It is also odd that the card was designed and produced by the Department of Defense.  What's that about?

What?

 In the new world, more people will have hearing aids.

Why?  Because we can no longer lip read.  People who are in the early stages of hearing loss read lips, and interpret facial expressions, to help understand what someone is saying.  But we're all wearing masks now (well, most of us are), so that's not possible.  And the masks muffle the spoken word, and we're not able to get close, so as to hear better, because we're social distancing.

So those of us who are losing our hearing, instead of unconsciously adapting and adjusting as we always have, are instead coming right up against the unfortunate truth:  it's time for hearing aids.  So, it seems, we'll all be hearing better in the new world.

In addition to a rise in hearing aid sales due to people discovering they need them much earlier than normal, folks who already have hearing aids will be replacing them more often.  Why?  Because the mask ear-straps get caught on the hearing aid's ear-loops and they come out, fall to the floor - and their dogs eat them.

So now you know. 

The Difference

 

Actually, the Pfizer vaccine is in the air now.

Uh-oh

This post is kind of an update of the last two posts, which speculated how and when we would be able to emerge from our quarantine foxholes and begin to live life again.  How and when we get to the new world.

Uh oh.  It turns out that the assumption I used about vaccinated folks - they can't get the virus, and can't transmit it - is only half true.  "Vaccinated people might still be able to transmit the virus" is, apparently, a generally accepted understanding that I have completely missed.  In fact, this is true of people who are vaccinated for lots of common ailments, including "MMR, rotavirus, chicken pox, shingles* and influenza,"   If you get vaccinated, and then get exposed, or you're infected when vaccinated, you could still be infectious after vaccination.

The "might" in the first quotation above is interesting:  the makers of the coronavirus vaccines do not know if we'll be contagious after vaccination or not.  AstraZeneca thinks not, but their vaccine is only about 70% effective, which is not enough for me to take my mask off.

So - extrapolate as needed.  And the news gets worse - after we're vaccinated, if we're shedding the virus, we might be shedding it for weeks, perhaps months, afterwards.  And, please note that this estimate is contained in an article entitled "Should the Recently Vaccinated Be Quarantined to Prevent an Outbreak?"  Oh, boy.

The new world seems to be a moving target.

 * - I didn't even know that shingles was contagious.

Showing the "V"

Hidden deep within a wide-ranging news roundup post, is this interesting tidbit:

The boss of Australia's Qantas airline, Alan Joyce, on Tuesday said proof of vaccination will likely become the only way people will be allowed to fly.

Coincidentally, I was thinking about the new world the other day, and I found myself imagining little stickers, round, maybe an inch across, with a gold "V" on a red background.  Just like the "I voted" stickers.  

Somehow, we'll need to be able to prove, quickly and easily, that we have, in fact, been vaccinated.

Mr. Joyce won't let us on his airplanes if we can't do this.  What else will depend on the "V"?  And how will we prove it?

Let's assume for a moment that vaccination will ensure that we won't get the virus and that we won't give the virus to anyone else.  For a start, that means we won't need to wear a mask.  Which means that the "V", whatever it is, should not be something we have to dig out of our wallet, or look up on our phone.  It will mean that we can eat or drink in a restaurant or bar, and we can go to the movies as long as everyone we pack into the theater with also has a "V".  We can go to work, and go to school.  If 70% of us have our "V", we have herd immunity, which sounds great but won't work out so simply in the real world.

Will the elderly or medically fragile among us be allowed to check for the "V" before entering a class, or a meeting, or an office, or a restaurant?  Will there emerge cultural distinctions, or even prejudices, regarding "V"s and non-"V"s?  

For a brief moment I thought about a tattoo, maybe on the palm.  The forehead?  Probably not.  What else?  How will prove we're "V"-ed?  

And for how long?  How long will it be important to distinguish between those of us who have been vaccinated, and those of us who haven't?   

The new world just got a little more interesting.

Masks and Curbside Pickup - How Long?

I have been vaguely thinking about how vaccinations will change how we do things:  who does what, and why.

We've been waiting for a vaccination since March, and will be waiting a while longer.  But what are we waiting for?

To begin with, we are waiting for the day when we're no longer afraid of getting sick.*  But how will that work?  Normal flu vaccines operate at about 40%-60% efficiency, which means that even if you get a flu vaccine, whether you get sick is a (complicated) coin flip.  The COVID vaccines are testing at better than 90% efficiency, and if that holds up in the real world (not guaranteed), then we can feel a good deal safer.

But will we change our quarantine behavior?  People like me are working on the assumption that if we get COVID-19, we will die, or be so sick, for so long, that we'll wish we were dead.  With the vaccine, if I resume normal life, there's around a 10% chance I'll get the virus.  Russian roulette with a 10-chambered gun.  Worth it?  

Much will depend on how much infection is still out there, which in turn will depend on how many of us actually get the vaccination.  We can depend on the protection of herd immunity with a vaccine once 70% of us have either had the virus or have been vaccinated.  So one approach is to continue quarantine after getting vaccinated, until herd immunity has been declared.

And so on.  There will be much discussion on this and related topics, in the new world.  

 

* - At least those of us who have had the good sense to have spent 2020 being afraid of getting sick.

Amnesia

From what I can tell, this blog is reflecting the wider world's thinking about the new world:  it's not.  Thinking about it, that is.  Posts have been scarce.

Most posts here are the result of my running across something interesting while doing something else.  I haven't been Googling "post-COVID world" much - mostly, I haven't had to.  Interesting ideas seemed to have been around almost every corner.

This is much less true now.  It feels like, at the point where we might be able to speculate vaguely about the date when the pandemic will be "over," we have stopped thinking about what it will be like when we get there.  It's like we're gritting our teeth and screwing our eyes closed, and willing that date to arrive.  Getting through the interregnum by willing it away.

Speaking just for myself, one thought about the new world has been growing, truly unbidden, in my mind.  That is:  we will return to the status quo ante.  Nothing will have changed.  We will be so glad that the pandemic is finally gone - that it is not consuming our full attention, our every action - that we will be very happy to forget it as soon as possible.  Including forgetting everything we learned.

I hope I'm wrong.

2022

I hereby declare that we will not have reached the new world until most (all?) of us do not have to use masks, or practice social distancing, or wash our hands more than we did before.

Unlike many similar unilateral decrees, this one is useful.  It allows for conversations such as:

"New world yet?"

"Speak up, I can't hear you through the mask."

"Guess not."

A brief glance around will tell us if we've made it or not.  Very useful, to know when you've gotten to where you're going.

It also gives us a chance to speculate about just how long this journey is.  This is also useful, because we have been drifting around aimlessly for a while.  So how long is it?

Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke by Zoom to doctors and students at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia last week.  

I feel very strongly that we're going to need to have some degree of public health measures to continue...It's not going to be the way it was with polio and measles, where you get a vaccine, case closed, it's done.  It's going to be public health measures that linger for months and months.

He went on to talk about herd immunity - done the right way, centered on an effective and safe vaccine - and noted that he didn't think that immunity would be achieved to a "profound degree" until late 2021 or early 2022.

And that's if the vaccine process does not encounter significant obstacles that cost significant amounts of time.  The other day, Pizer and BioNTech announced a significant milestone in their vaccine testing:  results indicated that it is "more than 90% effective at preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19."

This is great, but we're not there yet.  The study in question included less than 100 people.  Once all the testing is done, the real challenges remain.  There are over seven billion people in the world, and everyone needs two doses of this vaccine for it to work.  The vaccine has to be stored and transported and stored again at eighty degrees below zero (-80) centigrade (which is a startling one hundred and twelve degrees below zero Fahrenheit, if I've done the math right).  Skeptics have to be won over.  Political issues abound; the trickiest, probably, being:  who gets it first?  And will that decision be made on a national level?  Local?  Global?  The elderly, racial minorities, and those with medical vulnerabilities are most at risk - and generally have the least political power.*

So - 2022, if all goes well.  Another breath.  Check the telltale, trim the sails a bit.  Send the watch below for a hot meal.  The new world is still a long way off.

 * - I think that this last issue will be fascinating to watch, and how we work it out will send a clear message to later generations regarding the character of this crew of ours that makes it to the new world.

More Patience

Diego says he saw a bird while he was on watch in the maintop yesterday.  Diego's an idiot, so...

But Bartolome saw it again this morning, at dawn, so it must be.  He's the bo'sun and he knows.  But he says it's an albatross, which means it could still be a thousand miles to land.

So:  more patience.

Reorienting

Whew!  That was close.

If the Presidential election had gone the other way, I had the post prepared:

"This is the last post at this blog.  We have reached the new world."

But instead, we're back on the endless Atlantic, a little bewildered, looking for west.  

Take a breath, check the compass, set the sails.  We've got a long voyage still.

Japan's Baby Bust

Here at The New World, we've covered the baby bust and the baby boom.  Whether one happens, or another, seems to depend on how much control the population has on the complex process of reproduction.  Less control - for instance, less access to family planning - can cause an increase in births.  Populations - mostly in developed (non-poor) countries - with more control tend to opt out of parenthood - because they can - in times of economic uncertainty.

In Japan, most births take place within marriages, so fewer marriages will mean fewer babies.  In the three months leading up to June of this year, marriages in Japan fell 36.9% from the same period in 2019.  Births fell 11.4% in the same period.

It's not surprising to see the numbers of weddings diminish in times like these.  Hard to commit to a future that is over the horizon.  But Japan's response to COVID has, overall, resulted in less health, mortality and economic damage than in other industrialized countries.  Their recovery has been quicker.  This makes a reduction in weddings of over one-third a significant response.

Add to that the fact that, like most developed countries, Japan's birth rate has been declining (by 5.8% in 2019), and average age has been rising.  In Japan, the average age is 45.9 - the highest in the world. 

Policymakers are scrambling to address the crisis, covering fertility treatment with health insurance and doubling the upper limit of a one-off government allowance for newlyweds to 600,000 yen ($5,726).

So COVID has made a disturbing situation much worse in Japan.  And since confidence in the future will probably wait, not until economies and virus protection actually improve, but when we think they have improved (much later), it may take years for Japan's birth rate to return to pre-COVID levels - when it was declining.  

Japan is going to be different in the new world.  Government ministers are predicting disasters in a variety of systems, from social security to pediatrics.  Will a sudden dip in the birthrates of other developed nations - which are not far behind Japan in their steady decline - have similar impacts?  Demographic shifts can result in profound changes in society.  Japan's salaryman culture may be responsible for its "leadership" in this area, but the rest of us are not far behind. 

Give or Take

I don't know if it's because the US election is only a week away, but I'm thinking about dysfunction and dystopia, and terrible outcomes.  So I started reading about the effects of the virus on global poverty rates.  Isn't that what you do to allay anxiety?

Here it is, from the IMF, reported by the Brookings Institute:

In 2019, the IMF was predicting a slow decline in global poverty over the next ten years.  Just one year later, that has changed to a rapid growth in the near term, followed by a decline.  Roughly speaking, it will take nine years to return to the level of poverty predicted for this year.

This suggests that the IMF feels that the forces which have been reducing poverty over the last few years will eventually resume their work, and poverty rates will begin coming down again - from a much higher level than expected, due to the economic devastation wrought by the virus.  Even in 2030 - ten years from now - poverty will still be seven tenths of a percent higher than predicted in 2019.  If that doesn't seem like much, let's do some math.

The Google says that the world now contains 7.8 billion people, and that population growth is declining.  Extrapolation from some of these graphs suggests that we can use 0.7%, on average, as the growth rate over the next ten years or so.

Roughly speaking, then, we add 0.7% of 7.8 billion, which is 54,600,000, to the population of the world each year for ten years.  That's 7.8 billion plus 546 million.  Still with me?  We're almost done.

So - again, roughly speaking - we will have around 8,346,000,000 (8.346 billion) people in the world in 2030.  The IMF prediction is that seven percent of us - 584,220,000 - will be poor.  However, according to our graph, without COVID, only 6.3% of us -525,798,000 - would have been poor.

The difference is 58,422,000.  Just under sixty million.  That is people who will be living in the circumstances of poverty ten years from now, just because we let a pandemic get out of control.

These are people who would be making ends meet but will not be, long after the pandemic is gone.  The human cost is staggering - each number is a person without enough to eat, or nowhere to get out of the rain, or nowhere to find a job, or attend a school, or see a doctor, or enjoy a long healthy life. 

And the new world will, starting now, be coping with this increase of poverty every day for more than ten years.  Fifty eight million people.  Give or take.  Unevenly distributed, no doubt.  Again, we're thinking of tipping points.  That's a long time for an emerging economy to address the needs of more people in poverty than they ever expected.  

We know this is going to happen.  It's happening now, and won't stop for a long time.  Will we respond quickly, effectively, compassionately?  

Hard to tell. We're an uncertain people, give or take.

The View from the FT

Martin Wolf is the associate editor and chief economics commentator at the "Financial Times", a staid old (est. 1888) British financial and economic journal.  He's also been awarded the CBE by the Queen, so never let it be said that I don't drop names.

Anyway, in an embedded video in this FT article*, Wolf has some things to say about the post-COVID world.  He presents them pretty confidently, so I thought I'd pass them on.

Wolf has the good grace to begin by saying that "the most important answer is that we really don't know what's going to happen.  It is a completely novel experience."  Well, yes.  

Except - we do know that we will emerge with a lot more debt than we're used to, certainly in the public sector, but also in the private sector.  There will be an unprecedented number of defaults, mostly in the private sector and mostly in emerging economies.  "These are sources of great fragility," he warns.

They certainly are.  The damage caused to emerging economies (read:  poorer countries) may be the big story as we drift further into this Sargasso Sea of pandemic.  Whole cultures destroyed?  A breakdown of the civil structure in multiple countries in the same region (Latin America, perhaps?).  This is the route that we could take to dystopia, if that were to be the outcome.

Wolf moves on to the good news - in which he is less confident.  The debt will be manageable; interest rates will remain low, as will inflation.  But taxes will rise (even I could figure this out) and, he adds, taxes on the well-off will rise, too.  Interesting that "taxes" are not necessarily about the "well-off" unless that is specified.  A little peek into the tax-free world of the ultra-rich.  In fact, he goes on to say that "we are not going to be able to repeat... the austerity measures that followed the last crisis."  The "austerity measures" of the last crisis were, we need to understand, imposed on the many to prevent the inconvenience of the few.  Not this time.  We're done with austerity.  The few may even need to start paying a small percentage of their fair share.  This, in Wolf's world, is something to take note of.  He has the gall to add, 

"This will be a new social contract, if you like. (Oh, I like it.  A lot).  It might be as profound as what happened after the Second World War, which is a period of relatively high equality."  

Imagine that.

Then he moves on to effects which are possible but not certain.  He notes that "the virus and the response to it is dividing the world, even though it is a common experience."  Trade relationships are fracturing, especially between the US and China, but among EU countries as well (not to mention Brexit, which will be a meteor smashing into whatever chaos the virus has wrought).  "There is serious discussion of ending the World Trade Organization or ending trade globalization."  Nationalism and protectionism are on the rise.  These forces will result in "massive shifts in business and the way business works."  

Well.  That can't be good.  Especially the part about the rise of nationalism and the fracturing of global alliances and trading networks.  Sounds familiar...

Wolf goes on to predict the permanence of WFH, with resulting changes in commuting and, therefore, in real estate and urban planning and how cities work.  He doesn't go into details.  We can deduce what the details of the new landscape will be, and I suspect that much will be written about this as time goes on.  He also notes that there will be losers in this new urban environment - the smaller and smaller proportion of us who cannot work from home, and the businesses we work for.  If urban planning in general, and commuting infrastructure specifically, moves down the priority list because fewer workers are commuting, those who must commute lose out.  But we already knew this.

"I think it is reasonable to suppose," Wolf says in summary, "that the world we will emerge into... will be really quite different from the world we were in before the pandemic hit us."

As always:  Stay tuned.

 * - By the way - the article, with the video, was published in mid-September, before caseloads shot up in so many developed nations.  So - pay attention, and extrapolate.

Leadership

I've been thinking about yesterday's post-apocalyptic post a lot since I clicked "Publish."  I think I may have been a bit too offhand.  It's not a joke.

For all that thought, I don't actually have a lot to say.  Years ago, my son gave me a copy of Malcom Gladwell's "The Tipping Point."  It's stuck with me, on a number of levels.  I've had a career as a social scientist, and I'm very interested in learning about the behavior of groups of human beings.  

And I don't see any reason why, after the entire world spends a whole year or more in fear and isolation, emerges from it broke and destitute, the whole world wouldn't want some justice.  Things get worse and worse, and then someone - or many someones - with the right combination of characteristics show up at the right moment - and the point tips.

If this is the direction we are going to go in, then leadership is more important in 2020 than it has been, perhaps, in the entire history of human civilization.  With good leadership, the virus can be contained and vaccinations facilitated.  With good leadership, this still-wealthy world can stretch itself to provide everyone with what they need until most of us are back on our feet.  Without good leadership... 

It's anybody's guess.

Anniversary

 Darn.  I missed the 100th post which, as it turns out, was a cartoon.  Time sure does fly.

But I didn't miss the anniversary.  I wrote the first post about the new world exactly six months ago today.  And no, I would not have guessed that, six months on, there would still be no sight of land.

Come the Apocalypse

I'm a big fan of post-apocalyptic science fiction stories.*  They are about a new world, where everything has been thrown up in the air and has come down differently.

I was reading an article this morning, about unrest in Ecuador, Chile and Columbia, and suddenly it occurred to me that our new world, the post-COVID world I've been speculating about for six months, could actually turn out to be a post-apocalyptic world.  

The unrest in Latin America - some of it violent - preceded COVID and was about "inequality, corruption and government austerity policies."  The article - a short one - was about how COVID could just make all these things worse.  Do you think?  "Coming out of the pandemic, we will have a level of economic activity and employment that will be much lower than before, a level of poverty and income distribution that is worse," noted Alejandro Werner, the IMF's director for the Western Hemisphere.

Widespread economic devastation, with the added factor of widespread anger at governments perceived to have mishandled the pandemic and made things worse.  Desperation reaches an unbearable level, and things get out of hand.  Post-apocalyptic worlds have been created from less.

So, there's that to consider.  I suggest you choose from the wide variety of novels available, many of them about a worldwide, apocalyptic pandemic similar to our own.  And if it doesn't happen, at least you've read a good book.

 * - As always, I'm only a fan of the well-written ones, and, for the most part, not of the movie or TV variety, although the movie version of "The Road" wasn't bad (it helped that the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name won the Pulitzer)(it also helped that I'm a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy).

Ephemeral, or Not

 Here at “The New World,” we are committed to bringing you the newest and most compelling news about the post-COVID world.

Doesn’t that sound great?  What it means is that I spend a lot of time reading articles and Googling “post-COVID future.”  Sometimes it’s even fun!

I don’t know a lot about CNBC (we’ve never had cable TV) but it’s apparently a real thing, and they have apparently hired a somewhat bizarre ranter named Jim Cramer who says he wants to make me some money.  Well, not me specifically, but you get the idea.

So Jim Cramer, who shouts and emotes and gestures as if his market analysis has driven him to the brink of a breakdown, recently laid out what he thinks is the market’s predictions for the post-COVID future.  After reminding us of the second law of the stock market* - “The market’s a forecasting machine, which reflects expectations about the future, much more than facts about the present… We don’t care where stocks have been; we care where they’re going.”

That said, here is his list of “permanent” and “ephemeral” trends for the future according to the performance of relevant stocks.

Permanent:
Peleton -  This upscale exercycle company was struggling a year ago, and then suddenly no one could go to the gym – at the beginning because the gym was closed, but more recently because the gym chain you used to go to is bankrupt.  Home exercise – and the machines we use at home – will be a permanent fixture of the new world.  Apparently, if you spend that much for an exercise machine, there’s little motivation to abandon it and pay even more for a gym membership.
Wayfair – Here’s a company that was about to lay off 550 employees in February – and then suddenly everyone was working from home.  And needed office furniture, and a comfortable place to work.   Wayfair’s stock went from 21 to over 300.    Cramer says it’s here to stay, and so is RH,** which has been around a very long time but has had a “magnificent run” in the COVID market.  

Ephemeral:
Cooking at home – Packaged foods are still selling well, but their stocks are not – suggesting that the market thinks we’ll all go back to eating out four to five meals a week, on average, when this is all over.  Remember restaurants?
Boating – Brunswick, a big maker of recreational boats, is “out of boats, with giant backorders,” but the market does not see this continuing indefinitely.  For what it’s worth, Cramer thinks they’re wrong.
Used cars – Carvana is a used-car company with a contactless business model that essentially offers “vending machines for used cars – you don’t have to talk to anybody.”  This model was in place before COVID, and for obvious reasons it’s hot now.  The market says it’s here to stay.  Who wouldn’t want to buy a used car without dealing with a used car dealer?

And so forth.  The best way to travel right now?  AirBnB, as long as you book the entire house (which is often the same price as a nice hotel room, but without the other guests) and bring the sanitizing wipes.  RVs – a really safe way to travel – are selling well now, but the market seems to think that won’t last in the new world.

So, watching the stock market seems like an interesting way to start sketching the outlines of the new world.  All this, of course, depends on whether we’ll continue any of the behaviors that are necessary now, in the new world, when they’re not necessary.  And how far away we are, and what monsters lie ahead.


* - The first law of the stock market is:  “The stock market is not the economy.”

** - RH used to be Restoration Hardware; it’s where we got replacement hardware for the Victorian furnishings in the antique houses we bought and restored.  Now, apparently, it’s a (very) upscale Wayfair.

Time Flies

"Boy, time sure flies when every day is joyless and exactly the same."

                                                                       The New Yorker - 10/19/2020

New World Bauhaus

I'm watching a documentary about the Bauhaus, a school of design and architecture which was started by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919.  It was big on throwing out the rulebook and depending on creativity and a connection with shape, substance and color.  It is loved and hated to this day.  Many buildings that came out of the Bauhaus are with us still.

One small part of the origin story struck me.  The Bauhaus began just after the end of World War I, a terrifyingly brutal war, and at the end of the flu epidemic that killed millions worldwide. 

The artists and architects who stood in the ashes of the war and the pandemic, and looked into the future, saw a world of unlimited possibilities.  The nightmares were over, and were replaced by creativity, color, and brilliant functionality that freed them to experience and find delight in their new world.

The year 2021 will apparently bring us to the end of nightmares that have haunted us, one for a year, and one for four years.  We will see nothing but limitless opportunity.  Finally freed from the bonds of fear and despair, we will soar.

What new Bauhaus will we create?  Please forgive me my naivete and insufficient cynicism, but I can't wait.   

Correction, Sort Of

 Back in May, I wrote this:

...here in my home county, the use of plastic grocery bags was banned starting March 1. By March 20, the ban had been lifted – apparently, bringing your own bag to the grocery store helps spread the virus. Sure it does.

The ban was lifted on March 20 - that much was accurate - but not for the reason I suggested.*  According to the DEC, who should know, the single-use plastic bag ban was lifted, less than three weeks after it was instituted, due to a lawsuit brought by the Plastic Bag People - Poly-Pak Industries, Inc., et. al., in the NYS Supreme Court.  The lawsuit was settled in August (five months!) and the ban on single-use plastic bags will be reinstated in New York State this coming Monday, October 19.  The court's decision changed the original ban in an apparently (oops - there's that word again) minor way, regarding the thicknesses of the bags involved, so there will be plenty to argue about for a long time to come.

What does this have to do with the new world?  I'm not sure.  I'm not sure of anything anymore.  I'm hoping that it will contain a plastic bag ban, and any nonsense about reusable bags will be put to rest.  But probably not - we'll be telling tales, that are "apparently" true, about the virus for a long time to come.

Still no vaccine?  I'm going back to sleep. 

 * - The "reason" was something that I, like the President last night, "had heard about."  But the President was lying, and I was just being sloppy.  However, at the time, opponents of the bag ban insisted that the reusable bags that were to replace the plastic ones "can sustain viruses for months at a time if they're not regularly sanitized."  In fact, major grocery outlets banned reusable bags - completing the Plastic Bag People's bonanza wish list - for the same reason.  In July, Hannaford and Stop 'n Shop, two of the three grocery stores we use, lifted the reusable ban but insisted that customers with reusables bag their own groceries - which allowed them to remain agnostic regarding the danger of COVID contamination.  Trader Joe's, which has been overly cautious since the beginning, still does not allow customers to use reusable bags in the store.

Post-COVID Recovery Clinics

One thing the new world will have - because they're already here - is post-COVID recovery clinics.  I've never heard of a post-flu recovery clinic - you get over it and get on with your life - but COVID is different, as we have seen.

We are, unfortunately, learning a lot about the longer-term and permanent effects of the virus.  There is no doubt that these effects occur, in as many as a third to a half of cases, but we don't know how long they will persist, and we don't know, in most cases, why they occur.

Penn Medicine, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, already has a Post-COVID Recovery Clinic up and running.  You can read about it here.  There are others, and more are no doubt on their way.

As of this moment, almost 38 million cases of COVID-19 have been identified worldwide.  If only the tiniest fraction of them need help managing long-range and permanent side effects, healthcare in the new world will be very different.  But it's not going to stop at 38 million, and you know the numbers - one third to one half.  Do the math.

Anecdotal

No links, no references, no scholarly annotations.  A couple of casual conversations resulting in anecdotal support for a thesis about the new world.

It all started with a little explosion on a power pole just down from our house, in upstate NY, in early August.  Just a tiny burst; something with a long technical name failed, and the neighborhood was treated to a little power surge, which scrambled the brains of our refrigerator.  We learned (among other things) that, these days, refrigerators have brains.  Our particular refrigerator's brain cost $360. 

That didn't fix it, unfortunately, so off to the big box store, masks and all, to get a new refrigerator.  An hour later, as we were filling out the paperwork, the salesman mentioned that they were selling so many household appliances that it was hard to keep the warehouse stocked.  The reason?  "All these people from the city (NYC) moving up here and converting their cabins and second homes, and moving in."  People who were, apparently, escaping from a crowded city which was the center of a global pandemic for a while.  Escaping upstate to safer territory - for instance, our whole county of around 62,000 had 30 cases total until the college students returned in late August.  Sending their kids to schools in towns with zero cases.

The second conversation occurred recently, with real estate agent who manages summer bookings for our rental house out toward the end of Cape Cod.  She also described a sharp increase in sales, in this case, home sales, but for the same reason.  People from more urban areas, who work remotely, moving to a town with 16 cases since the beginning, again either upgrading second homes or, more frequently, selling the house in the city and moving to a place where their kids can go to school without fear.  

Now both places happen to be blessed with astounding natural beauty, and are (normally) centers of tourism.  So there's that.  On the Cape, there's a long tradition of people upgrading from part-time to full-time residency (they're called "Washashores").  And we've seen this before in NY, when refugees from NYC moved away from the fear and the death right after 9/11.

But it's happening again.  Families from the cities - most of whom are probably familiar with their rural destinations - will be establishing themselves in the country.  They'll be absorbing culture shock and adjusting to the off-season.  They'll be finding ways to get connected with the community.  And it's not a stretch to suggest that this may be happening all over the country.

Will this migration have a noticeable impact on the new world?  Will rural areas within striking distance of a big city grow and change?  For the better, or not?

Stay tuned.

Not Awake Yet

Well, awake - yes.  What is it we are doing until this is over?  What do we call it?  We are living in a dreamworld.  Not a particularly nice dream; mostly boring.  Frozen in time.  On hold.  

But not asleep, so to speak.  In fact, the recent hiatus at this blog is not the result of ennui, or illness, or wandering in the wilderness.  No one's in a coma.  Stuff has happened, actually, and mostly good stuff.

First, a week or so visit from the elder son and daughter in law and The World's Cutest Grandbaby.  We'd all been quarantining to an agreed-on intensity - we were in the same "pod," a concept that, I think, will survive the coming of the new world.  So we could hang out together.

During that time, a "pod" anchored by Abbey's sister gathered at her house, down the road from us here in Truro, MA, and we spent every day gathered on the beach or the deck, outside in the breeze.  They stayed for another week after our "pod" left.  And then Abbey and I spent a week writing postcards to voters, asking them to vote for people we knew who were running for the NYS legislature.  Fun times.

In case we've beaten the Columbus expedition of 1492 to death, as an analogy for our progress through te COVID and out into the new world, we might consider a new analogy - hibernating bears.  Is there a vaccine?  Is it time to wake up?  No.

So the new world is back, but no clearer, or nearer, than it was before.  Right now, it looks like the new world will involve a lot of hard work by competent people, digging ourselves out of  the mess we've made.  It's like the cave collapsed on us, and it's going to take a long time to dig out and find a new place.  

In the meantime, go on back to sleep.  Oh - but don't forget to vote.

Not Yet

 "Still no vaccine.  Go back to sleep."

                                                    

                                                                                                                            The New Yorker - 10/6/20

Trinkets

 I want to share a number.

In the new world prediction game, one of the more difficult tasks is distinguishing among trends that started before 2020 and will continue afterwards; fads brought on by the day-to-day living conditions of the pandemic which will fade with time, and truly revolutionary changes, caused by those conditions, which will reshape the new world in a noticeable way.

This task is made all the harder when the content is something I know little or nothing about.  In this case, it is the world of online influencers and real-time online shopping through any number of platforms I have never heard of.

So let's just keep it simple, and then we can all go home and think about what it could mean.  "It" is 560 million.

Apparently, you can go online and watch an influencer advertise a product.  Then you can buy that product, right at that moment, perhaps at a discount available only at that moment.  There's much more to it than that, of course, but we're keeping it simple.  It's called a bunch of things, including "e-commerce live-streaming."

The interesting part of all this is that number above.  560 million is the number of Chinese who watched shopping live-streams in March of this year.  That was during the lockdown, so most weren't busy doing something else, but still.

The Google says there are 1.39 billion Chinese.  In march, over half a billion of them were watching influencers sell them stuff.  That is more than one in three.

I'm no expert, but that's a big number.  By far the biggest number of watchers ever in China.  One in three.  And given the popularity of influencers - only those with really magnetic personalities make it big, meaning that everyone is... magnetized - and the delightful efficiency of online shopping, it's hard to believe that those 560 million Chinese will give it up any time soon.  Nor will the millions in other countries who have gotten hooked while quarantining and don't see a need to give it up.

So I think that, in the new world, we will not only order online, but a huge portion of the economy will be controlled by vivacious young people selling us trinkets.  We will talk about them, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, argue about which are the best, much as we do now about movies or sports.  One question is, of course, which section of the commercial economy will contract and perhaps even disappear under the onslaught?

China's Sputnik Moment

I've been away from The New World because our son, DiL and 14-month-old grandbaby have come to visit for a week, and I'd rather be with them than with you.  Sorry, no offense, but that's just the way it is.  We all have been quarantining pretty strictly since the beginning, so we can live together like this whenever we want to.

I have been reading, though, every once and a while.  There's a lot of thought and speculation about the balance of power in the new world.  I've been reading and writing with a bunch of people about this and other topics, and a Chinese participant had an interesting summary.

The US-China trade war and the supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened sense of vulnerability of concentration of global supply chain from and through China, as well.*

This is nothing new.  The complex disruption of every supply chain in the last six months has been discussed extensively, and I hope we can look further into it - and its future - at some time.  

There will be efforts at diversifying from China to reduce exposure.  However, the immediately (sic) fallout from the pandemic so far has paradoxically strengthened China's (and E/SE Asia's more broadly) position as a reliable platform for the global supply chain as well as a reliable consumer market, with the generally rapid and effective (to date) responses to COVID-19 in the region, which make possible "v" shaped economic recoveries.

She goes on to describe a long process of reducing China's dependence on foreign technology, going back to the origins of Red China.  However, as a result of the chaotic disruptions of the pandemic, "it is now greatly accelerated and with strong consensus even in the Chinese corporate sector (the effort previously was a more state driven)... The Trump years and its incoherent and highly volatile China policy has been a Sputnik moment for China."  Boy, if you have to mix a metaphor, that's the way to do it.

The rise of China and the fall of America is widely documented, and this process has certainly "accellerated" in 2020.  It is ironic that the acceleration has much to do with the Chinese's eventual success with COVID, and America's apparent unwillingness to do much about it.  Even assuming a change of administration,

...there is no going back.  China and Chinese companies will still source from the US, but it will attempt to avoid situations where US technology and products is irreplaceable.  I see American companies losing market share first to European/Japanese/South Korean/Taiwanese competitors, then to Chinese competition, first in the Chinese market and then globally.

I wrote about America being "left behind" in this blog's second post, and more and more, the process by which that will happed - and the reasons for it - are becoming clearer.  We will no doubt revisit this slow-motion planetary collision.

* - I have not edited my correspondent's writing.  I could never hope to write as well in Chinese (or, for that matter, in any language) as well as she does in English.  We can live with the tiny imperfections.

72,842

Perhaps the biggest question about the new world will be:  What will the economy look like?  The answer right now?  No idea.

We've been playing around with possibilities, such as this and that, but there aren't any guideposts or signs or peeks over the horizon.  We can look at what is the case right now, and say, "Hmm... "

Yelp is an app that rates restaurants and other businesses.  It's the most frequently-referred-to app of its kind, but it is, apparently, also a vast storehouse of basic data on businesses.

Yelp says that, at the end of the second quarter of 2020, the number of businesses that were closed in the US had decreased, from 177,000 in April to 132,500 in early July.  Good news!  However, of those businesses closed in July, more than half - 72,842 - were closed permanently:  they had indicated to Yelp's data collectors that they were not planning to open again.  Ever.

72,842 businesses that existed in February, gone in July, forever.  And that's just July.  As the American pandemic doldrums drag on, more and more businesses will have to let go, and give up.  Which means that the 'recovery' (which is not, at this point, even a twinkle in Chris Columbus's eye) when it begins, will have to do without them.  72,842 businesses that will not be re-opening their doors, ordering supplies and materials, hiring or rehiring staff, and welcoming customers back at long last.  We'll start more than 72,842 businesses behind.

,That's gonna leave a mark on the new world.

Collateral Damage

We've heard about the baby boom (reduced access to family planning resources) and the baby bust (can we afford to bring a child into the new world?), each of which might have an impact on the size and character of the population of the new world.  Now Nature brings us the story of stillbirths, from a survey of 20,000 women who gave birth in nine hospitals in Nepal.  It seems that in this population, between March and May, stillbirths increased by 50%.  The same result - increase in stillbirths of around 50% - was found in a study of four Indian hospitals, between March and June.*

In England, a similar study found that stillbirths increased fourfold.  There may be an uptick in Scotland, as well. 

There is some confusion about the numbers, at least in Nepal and India, involving percentages, absolute numbers, and lack of data. The basic issue is that women did not come in to their medical providers for regular or emergency visits at anywhere near the normal rate, and the number of women who gave birth in hospitals fell by half in Nepal - while the number of stillbirths recorded in hospitals remained the same.  What happened to the half of women who normally would give birth in a hospital but, during the lockdown, did not?  That's the "lack of data" part.  No one knows.

I find it chilling to think of mothers - millions of them? - who were unable or unwilling to go into a dangerous world to get essential care and resources which would lead to a healthy birth.  And the fact that after they fell off the radar, their access to these resources was gone.  How many complications led to how many tragic disasters?  How many empty cradles around the world?  We don't know.

Asma Khalil, an obstetrician involved in the English study, calls these findings "the collateral damage of the pandemic."  Indeed. 

* - The original study in Nepal is here; the Indian study (both in The Lancet), is here..  The original English study, in JAMA, is here.

Fonts Again

You may have noticed that I've got the fonts under control finally.  The secret?  Never copy/paste.  Ever.  I used to write posts in a word processor (so that if something went wrong I had it saved), and then copy it all to Blogger.  No more. I'm living on the edge.  And every indented quote, every long title, everything from somewhere else, has been completely retyped.

Blogger, it seems, cannot make imported text its own - when I highlight the whole post and change it all to Verdana font (which is what I use), it says it's all converted but it lies.  So everything has to originate in Blogger.

Anyway - you're welcome.

And, by the way - I'm not going back and retyping all the wonky posts from long ago.  Sorry.

Coronasomnia

While I was working at my 35 year career, I liked to get into work early.  I had a routine that had me up at 5:30 AM, and it worked well for me.

But after I retired, and no longer had to get up on any kind of regular basis, I woke up at 5:30 anyway.  Eleven years later, that's still the case.

So - sleep habits:  nature or nurture?  Clearly nurture in my case.  If this is generally true, the new world could see a lot more sleep disruption.

Back in June, it seemed that our sleep cycles were becoming more natural, because of a reduction in structured activities that normally would cause "social jet lag."  Now we are hearing about the aptly named "coronasomnia," caused by the increasing stress and anxiety of a world in chaos.

This is, apparently, a real thing, and something that is being taken seriously by the medical community.  It isn't hard to understand why.  Many of us have been set adrift, perhaps with adequate finances but disconnected from everything.  Zoom is not real life.  Others of us have had our jobs, our finances, our futures uprooted.  And none of us can see any hope if it changing soon.

Those who had difficulty sleeping in the before have significantly more difficulty; those who have had occasional nightmares are having significantly more.  In addition to "stress" and "anxiety," these sleep problems are described as being the result of "dread."

If this goes on long enough, there may be no springing back.  A particularly distinct form of PTSD.  A lot more cranky, touchy, less-productive, unfocused - tired - people in the new world.

Busted, in the New World

 "You have to say 'hi' to them.  My parents saw you wander into the frame."

                                                                                                  The New Yorker, 9/8/20

Some (Just a Little) Good News, Finally

I am tired of reading about vaccines.  In fact, I've stopped reading about vaccines.  Wake me up sometime next year, when we're nearly there.

But it seems that the work on the COVID-19 vaccine has already propelled us, all unknowing, into one small corner of the new world.  Apparently, vaccines will never be the same again.

The current pandemic is not, of course, the worst we have ever seen.  The 1918 flu killed millions; the Black Plague, half of Europe.  But it is dangerous, it spreads like wildfire, and no one in their right mind wants to get it.  So the work of creating a safe, effective vaccine has taken on a special urgency around the world.

And this effort - truly enormous, using the highest of tech and supported to the fullest - has resulted in innovations that will very possibly allow for the next pandemic vaccine to be developed much more quickly.

The new world, we are told, will contain much more innovative vaccine trial designs, such as running human and animal trials in parallel.  New types of vaccines are being developed - for instance, those based on messenger RNA - and are being found useful.  And the speed with which the virus's genome was decoded and shared worldwide - a necessary step before we can even begin any high-speed work on a vaccine - was unprecedented, and there's no reason to believe that this won't become the norm.  And as research into side effects continues, databases are being shared globally, reducing redundancy and increasing reliability of results.

After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was formed.  Launched in 2017 (without the US's participation) , CEPI "aims to accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable access to these vaccines for people during outbreaks.  These folks were ready, and now they're funding nine different candidate vaccines, more than any other organization in the world.  So going forward, there is an international, full-time, well-funded scientific community standing as the first line of defense against the next pandemic. 

And the new world will apparently include universal adult immunization.  Once the vaccine is widely available, herd immunity can be achieved if everyone gets it, or enough get immunized that the virus finds it impossible to spread.  That's how we did it with all those communicable diseases that our kids get shots for, but for COVID-19, we adults will have to join in.  Right now about a third of us get our flu shots every year; once the COVID-19 vaccine is added to the mix, they'll become more popular.  I can't find anyone who's willing to estimate what percentage of the population needs to be immunized to achieve herd immunity for COVID-19, but there's general agreement that the technical term "just about everyone" will come close.

So, good news.  You're welcome.  Now prepare to return to your regular diet of distress and despair. 

Polls, Then and Now

"Admiral of the Ocean Sea Christopher Columbus today announced the results of a poll of his crew regarding the time it would take to complete the voyage.  Just under 58% thought it would be less than two weeks.  Fully two thirds of the officers predicted this result, although fewer of the rated seamen..."

Well of course not.  But I'll bet that at least 58% of the conversations, officers and men alike, were speculations on when they'd reach land.

An actual poll, released yesterday, suggests that 44% of us in America think it will be six months or more before "things return to normal," and 15% guess three months or more.  So a majority of us are in for the long haul, at least until Christmas.   

The same poll suggests that 2/3 of us don't think school reopenings are going well, and of that group, only half think we'll ever get it right.  We're drifting in the doldrums, alright.

Oh - and by the way - the 3-month and 6-month respondents were the optimists.  27% thought that "things will never get back to normal."

People are losing faith in the new world entirely.  Unfortunately, we can't turn the ship around and sail east.

Doldrums

It seems like the speculative writing about the new world is trailing off, and now consists of feature pieces of the "wouldn't it be great" variety, and business consultant firms assuring their skittish customers that everything will be fine (although there is occasionally something to be learned from these).

If you ask me (and by coming here to read this blog, you have), it's because we're no longer sailing across the Atlantic in search of the New World.  The Pinta has taken down its sails and is drifting with the wind, and wallowing in the calms.  There is no sense that we are making any progress, and certainly no evidence that we are making an effort to.  Occasionally we get blown back east, almost in sight of Portugal itself.  

Just sayin'.

A Choice from Ancient History

In order to write about the new world, one has to predict the future.  Speculate about how things will turn out a long time from now.

I got to thinking - how has that turned out in the past?

I was reading an article in The Atlantic called "How Will the Coronavirus End?"  Sounded like it was right down my alley.  It didn't take long, however, to realize that it was ancient - late March, to be (almost) precise.

As far as March is concerned, September might be the new world.  How did The Atlantic do?

Well, they did pretty well.  There were three sections - 'The Next Months,' 'The Endgame,' and 'The Aftermath' - or, in other worlds, the new world.

'The Next Months' was about testing, protective equipment, and social distancing.  Masks weren't a thing yet (can you imagine that?) and contact tracing wasn't mainstream yet.  For how long?  If all went right, with coordinated leadership and universal buy-in (remember "We're all in this together?"), "It could be anywhere from four to six weeks up to three months," Fauci said, "but I don't have great confidence in that range."

Four weeks to three months.  Isn't that adorable?  

Anyway, on to "The Endgame."  After disposing of the "everyone around the world does everything perfectly and the virus disappears" scenario, as well as the herd immunity scenario, we begin to consider the whack-a-mole scenario, which is, I think, the way it turned out.  

The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced.  This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.

Sounds like where we are.  And where we'll be until the vaccine is universal.

And then what?  The article ends with a step into our new world - after the virus is gone.  "The Aftermath."  Curiously enough (sarcasm alert) the new world will depend on the results of the election in November.   After discussing economic and mental health impacts, the reconsideration of America's penchant for isolationism and conformity-resistance (which hadn't, at that point, flared into the Mask Wars), and the endless cycle of "panic and neglect," we are treated to not one, but two new worlds.

In one, America single-handedly destroys the China virus (or at least that's how the history books tell it, in this scenario), and "turns further inward and pulls out of NATO and other international alliances, builds actual and figurative walls, and disinvests in other nations."  Just as after 9/11, when terrorism became the universal fear for politicians to exploit, in this new world, pandemics from "those countries" drives American isolation and aggression.

Or it could turn out another way.  We repudiate "America First," and...

...a communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic.. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation.  Bouyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges.  Gen C kids write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists.  Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy.  The US leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.

In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.

And we know what the difference between these two scenarios is, don't we?