Rollback 2020
A pdf of this is available here.
"I have always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened".
Those were the wise words of Marshal McLuhan the interesting Canadian communications theorist who is more famous for his quip "The medium is the message".
In this strange upside-down year so far, it is hard to predict what happened yesterday! In fact, the President's predictions about the past turned out to be fake too.
“It is going to disappear” - President Trump in early March.
When oil futures can turn negative we may not be far away from turning back the clock. Who doesn't want that to happen and roll back 2020? Do you want to go back to the good old days of Jan 1, 2020?
Have you watched Counterpart? Berlin bifurcates because of an experiment gone wrong and there are two parallel realities with each person having their counterpart in an alternate reality slowly evolving independently. And then the pandemic strikes. Sometimes it does feel like we slipped into the wrong reality.
Where do we go from here? It depends on if you are part of the 1% rich or 89.6 % poor. Like all stats, 89.6% is made up but you get the point. If you are the 1% you probably are already happily holed out in a bunker near Christchurch New Zealand. For the rest of us in the middle seat middle class, we await our daily groceries with the dripping wet sanitizers and hope for the best while trying to time twenty-seconds deeply scribbling our hands under the tap. We wipe and then just in case go back for seconds.
Talking about wiping, the topic of running out of toilet paper at one point surpassed even the fear of getting infected. Biden yes, Bidet Nope.
It seems a long time ago but it was actually early march when the fear of infection reached a tipping point forcing governments to act. Flattening the curve became the new phrase. Larry Brilliant, who spent decades working tirelessly in India in helping eradicate smallpox has been warning about this situation for a while. There are no shortcuts and we are forced to rethink our lives of the past 30 years. Quarantines soon took over the world as the invisible enemy started to take a toll across the world.
The most difficult part of these shutdowns is that it is suffocating the millions whose daily wages are on hold. From the slums of Bombay to the shacks of Sao Paulo it is death by virus or destitution, the daily wage vacuum necessitated by the lockdowns, exposing the stark divide in priorities. It is not clear how many will die of craving vs corona in these apocalyptic times for billions. David Beasley of the World Food Program has warned of a hunger pandemic resulting from the Covid-19 shutdowns. An estimated 265 million across the globe could face starvation by the end of the year if we don't act.
Protests have broken out in many states across the US although it is not clear if these are organic or orchestrated. We can't just open up suddenly for that would result in a resurge. Many options have been proposed. We may be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and damned if we open and damned if we don’t.
A typical day in the United States sees over 3500 deaths from cancer and heart disease. No one knows what has happened to those stats in the past month. Normalcy on the health front is unknown. CV deaths are trending at 1800 per day in the past few weeks. The future is, well in the future. The truth is no one knows.
Big disasters bring big bailouts. 6 trillion is being pumped. This is an order of magnitude more than 12 years ago at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Is there any accountability? Possibly minimal. The Paycheck Protection Program designed to help small businesses was out of money in a few days. Public companies like Shake Shack received 10 million while many mom and pop shops never saw their checks.
A health crisis demands a president who provides medicare for all. Early in Feb most Democrats shot themselves in the foot voting for a moderate who would get them halfway there. Now it seems bleak for we may be left with a leader who asks us to drink bleach. On a positive note, you may want to know that Richard Gere at age 70 just had a baby. A healthy boy.
Stay safe, see you next week.
References
https://www.barrons.com/articles/negative-oil-prices-from-the-folks-who-brought-you-the-financial-crisis-51587549601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series)
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5xm87/we-asked-people-buying-tons-of-toilet-paper-why 5 https://www.wired.com/story/whats-social-distancing-flattening-curve-covid-19-questions/
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/dharavi-s-economy-goes-down-the-tubes-11587152095394.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/coronavirus-america-future.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/24/entertainment/richard-gere-baby-boy-trnd/index.html