Just about the only thing that anybody got right a year ago in the course of peering ahead into 2020 was that a total eclipse of the sun would be observable on Dec. 14 across a narrow band of the South Atlantic, bits of Argentina and Chile and some islands in the South Pacific.
That was about it, so there’s no point in investing much confidence in any prognostications about what 2021 will bring. It’s probably safe to go so far as to expect things to get better, if only because of the difficulty in imagining things getting much worse. With several COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out around the world, there’s at least some cause to be optimistic. Also, Donald Trump will no longer be president. (???) Things could be looking up.
The toll the coronavirus pandemic took from us in 2020 can be coldly tallied. Of the 82.4 million people who are known to have fallen ill from COVID-19 over the past 12 months, only 58.4 million people have recovered, and by Dec. 30, 1,799,504 million people were dead. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development registered a global labour market impact from the pandemic in 2020 10 times as bad as the first few months of the 2008 global financial crisis. In Canada one in 10 workers lost their job.
In the United States, a Pew Research survey found that 15 per cent of Americans were thrown out of work in 2020, one in three Americans had dipped into their savings or retirement accounts just to pay bills, and among the laid-off workers in the U.S. was a 46-year-old Black man who lost his job at the Conga Latin Bistro in Minneapolis owing to the Minnesota government’s stay-at-home orders. George Floyd was himself recovering from COVID-19 when he was apprehended after allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store.
[Interesting Read]
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(1) 2021 will demand patience before it lives up to its promise
