Hello fellow warriors fighting this malignancy of a year,
John Oliver spoke for all of us when he blew up 2020. We are in the home stretch.
The worst moment for me was when my dad caught Covid. He was living alone in India and I still can’t forget the feeling of panic and helplessness of seeing him get weak and run a fever for 7 days straight. Thankfully he recovered well with some timely help from close family. 2020 is also the year where N and I have spent the most time apart from each other since we got married, running up to several months. It is also the first year in my life where I haven’t seen my parents face to face even once.
It sure has been sucky but let’s get one thing straight. These are inconveniences relative to the complete decimation that many have seen. The ticker is counting upwards towards 2M worldwide deaths. Millions have lost their livelihoods. Future looks bleak for many.
A better 2021 is the collective hope of all humanity. And yet logic dictates that a mere calendar flip on the midnight of December 31 wouldn’t magically fix our ills. If only 2020 were a reality show we could call an end to.
The title of this newsletter was conceived in the fading light of 2019 and since then it’s been accidentally proven as the one true aphorism of our times. What if 2021 could be worse?
New waves of Covid
As I type this, Thailand, which has enjoyed a long period of covid-less calm has suddenly discovered 500 new cases in one day. There is talk of more testing and potential lockdowns starting again. Europe is already in the middle of the second wave and it could see a third wave, come new year. In anticipation, Germany has closed shops from mid December until the 10 of January. European countries have now banned flights from UK and the country has imposed lockdown on more than a third of its population.
Meanwhile in the runaway train that is the US, deaths in the second wave have surpassed what we saw in the peak of Apr-May. Infections are rising exponentially. India, meanwhile, is just about getting done with what you could essentially consider a massive wave 1.
As we enter January, we seem to be entering it with trepidation of new waves of the virus.
Mutation of Covid
The D614G variant of covid has driven the vast majority of the covid infections. But viruses mutate with time. New mutations can alter how easily the virus spreads, fatality rates, immune system evasion and many other aspects. It’s an inevitable part in the life of a virus.
The new variant of Covid that has been discovered in the UK includes a genetic mutation in the spike protein. This is increasingly looking like the source of rising infections in the UK is 70% more transmittable.
This is not to say that mutations should cause us to panic. In fact, there will be mutations and variants emerging, especially as we deliver the vaccine to more and more people and the virus finds a way to adapt and survive. But, there is a non negligible risk of mutations that make the virus spread faster, be more resistant and become more deadly.
Vaccine efficacy and timelines
The news of the vaccine was the first shot in the arm the world needed. It offers a lot of hope but it’s going to take time. By Q2 of 2021, the rich countries may have gotten at least about half the countries vaccinated. But in India, it’s likely to take longer, given the complexities of distribution, costs and availability of the vaccines. Further, poorer countries are likely to be even farther along in the timelines.
Meanwhile, we still have to deal with all the waves until then without resorting to total and complete shutdowns.
The vaccines have efficiency ranging from 92% to 95%. Out in the real world, with people across countries, it’s likely to vary on either side. So, even if all goes to plan, it would be an “ok” vaccine which will get better over years. If you are looking at herd immunity thanks to vaccines happening, 2021 is still an ambitious goal for the same.
The real danger
There’s a problem with Covid narratives, where people of privilege get a disproportionate voice. This means that our response to this pandemic has been one advocating the most unsustainable approach - complete shutdowns, everyone working remotely and avoiding any public connection.
The bigger danger, and by a scale far higher is one of livelihoods, jobs and poverty. I cannot overstate this enough.
Extreme pressure can create some diamonds. It can also vaporize things. While we are praising resilient startups and new businesses for having adapted, that’s not even a sliver of the number of businesses that are being closed as we read this. It’s wonderful that digital service providers, online commerce, some biotech companies are making hay but millions of people have gone jobless without the prospect of their jobs returning anytime soon or at all. It is estimated that 81 million jobs were wiped out from just the Asia-pacific market in 2020. In India, several millions of jobs aren’t even organized enough to be counted and their loss would disappear into the ether.
Poverty rising, Prosperity moving to 1%
Extreme poverty is hard to imagine for us. The UN defines it as living sub $1.9 a day. If you walked into a café in Bangalore, you’d be hard pressed to find one item you could order with that amount.
For all its inadequacies, capitalism in concert with well meaning global organizations and non profit groups has uplifted more than 10% of the world out of extreme poverty. This has been the most affirming trend for humanity in the last few decades.
But things are shifting. The world food organization has rung the alarm bells for “famines of biblical proportions” in 2021 for huge sections of the world. For the first time in 20 years, extreme poverty will rise and an additional 80 - 115 million people will slip into it (as opposed to moving people out of it). To put this in context, it took the world 15 years from 2000-2015 to lift 800 million people out of this bucket.
It gets worse in India. A UN report indicates that as many as 400 million people may slip back into poverty in 2020. It took us 10 years from 2006 to lift nearly the same number out of it.
The World Bank has a measure called shared prosperity (growth in income for the poorest 40% of a country’s population) - a metric to measure inclusive growth. Between 2012 to 2017, shared prosperity increased in 74 of the 91 economies measured. However, between 2017-2021, average global prosperity is expected to flat or even contract. The poorest people are going to bear the brunt of this pandemic. Meanwhile during this same period, the top 1% of the world have done exceptionally well, cementing their place for generations to come to continue making windfall.
Mental health crisis
Sometimes, the biggest monsters are invisible ones. A virus is one. The emerging mental health crisis is another. The pandemic has turned this slow flooding crisis into a tsunami that will have ripple effects on the entire world and how we view each other.
Unemployment, lack of social connection, lockdowns all add to a very toxic mix. “Stay away from other people!” is the ultimate refrain of prioritizing one disease at all costs to another.
A mid-july poll in the US had more than half the respondents saying they were suffering some form of mental health issue (compared to 30% earlier this year). A survey from Indian Psychiatry association found that mental illness cases have increased by 20% in 2020. While other countries are funding and supporting systems to address this, India has largely treated this as a non-existent problem (or falsely as one of developed world). For a country that is dubbed the “suicide capital of south east asia”, we have a huge crisis on our hands without sufficient medical support.
Instability, dissatisfaction, radical governments
I feel a shift. Back in 2016, I wrote this long post titled “Is our era of peace about to end” where I argued that the unprecedented era of peace we have lived through maybe coming to an end. Back then, Trump was yet to become the president.
With the inflection of 2020, I feel more and more convinced by the pessimist in me that what I thought and wrote is only getting reinforced. I’ll repeat one sentence from that piece which I believe actually captures my view right now:
“Governments, without a capitalistic utopia to keep its citizens in their coops, are likely to resort to the second best option — false patriotism, common enemies, religion and war”
You can see traces of this already. There is a rising division among and within countries enough to have sections hating each other ferociously. Powerful countries have gotten more bellicose in their proclamations. China has a stated phase of dominance coming up as part of the larger vision which includes militaristic dominance. Then on top of all this you add rising poverty, technology upending century old structures and growing gap between the haves and have nots.
Historically, instability has always preceded authoritarian governments creating a narrative of ‘other’ to coalesce the country into doing terrible things.
If all that’s left you feeling suddenly that 2020 wasn’t the worst thing, I will have done my job. But I couldn’t be happier about being wrong than in this case.
Could be worse,
Tyag