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.