Goodbye 2020

I’ll be honest: It feels like such a cliché to be writing a retrospective on this memorably terrible year that I initially swore I wouldn’t do it. However, as this column happens to fall on December 31, pretentious reflection — or, as an alternative, pretentious wishful thinking about 2021 — is mandatory, so I have no choice. That’s just how the media business works. I’ll try to make it worthwhile.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) — the subject is discussed by a short academic paper included in the WHO’s 2011 annual bulletin — a pandemic is classically defined as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people.” Since this broad definition includes a number of illnesses that typically do not affect entire populations in a significantly disruptive way, such as the “normal” seasonal influenza, the WHO narrows it a bit by stipulating that a true pandemic is further identified by “almost simultaneous transmission worldwide.”

Based on that, pandemics are actually more common than we realize, historically occurring about every 12 to 15 years on average, although the ones that truly encompass the entire planet are much less frequent. We have to go all the way back to the Hong Kong flu of 1968 — an outbreak of the previously unknown (A)H3N2 influenza virus — to find one comparable in scope to the novel coronavirus. The Hong Kong flu killed at least one million people and, perhaps, as many as four million in 1968 and 1969; the exact number is uncertain because many of the victims were in China and the Soviet bloc, where such data was neither diligently kept nor shared with the outside world.

While the coronavirus pandemic is similar in scale in terms of the numbers of infections and deaths as the Hong Kong flu pandemic, the social and economic disruption it has wreaked on the world has been compared, more or less accurately, to the famous Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–1920. That disruption has been one of the most puzzling and disturbing things about our current crisis, because the Spanish flu was about 50 times deadlier than the coronavirus. In the 100 years since the Spanish flu, or for that matter, the half-century since the Hong Kong flu, the world ought to have gotten better at managing these disasters, but instead, we have evidently gotten much worse at it.

As we can expect this to happen again someday — we can hope it will be another 50 years in the future, but medical science and basic rational deduction tell us another pandemic of some kind is inevitable — examining what we did wrong, and more importantly, what a few places in the world did right, is an imperative. Whether or not that assessment is actually possible is uncertain in a sociopolitical environment in which ignorance is championed, and in which even the most illogical, baseless, and ideologically self-serving notions are given a public platform in the interest of sharing “alternative points of view.”

Of course, while preparing to respond effectively to a future pandemic is important, we still need to recover from this one. Here again, there is cause for concern. Because the pandemic and its impact on the economy were sudden, economic recovery policy, at least so far, tends to regard it as a mere interruption; a rather large one, to be sure, but still a relatively simple problem.

But more comprehensive thinkers — those not feeling the sands running out of the hourglass marking time until the next election — have begun to recognize that the pandemic has caused some fundamental shifts in the economy, and that simply “picking up where we left off” will not have the hoped-for results. Some mainstays of the pre-pandemic economy have been greatly diminished — tourism and labor exporting probably being the most obvious — while a few other sectors — for example, logistics — have grown to outsized importance. The characteristics and the utilization of the country’s workforce have changed in some ways, as well, and that has an impact on the flow of money through the economy. That is not necessarily bad, but it’s different enough that dusting off the same old policy blueprint and trying to apply it is not likely to be effective.

What I would like to see as we say goodbye and good riddance to 2020 and move into what will be at least several months of a sort of limbo as the vaccination effort gets underway is a thorough and inclusive review of how things have been done and a sensible consensus of recommendations on how best to move forward. I would guess some of the more ambitious and better-managed departments and agencies would probably do that, but it would be a surprise if the effort were to be started or encouraged by Malacañang, where thought processes seem to lie too close to the surface to tackle anything complicated.

Regardless of what the government does, taking careful stock of one’s circumstances and considering how best to move ahead is, I think, good advice for anyone, no matter what the scope of your responsibilities, whether those are to your business, family, or yourself. It would be a shame for anyone, having endured what for all of us has certainly been the most unusual year of our lives — and sadly for many of us, probably the worst — and not come out of it harder, better, faster, or stronger. So let’s take some joy in showing 2020 the door — kick it in the ass or give it the finger on the way out, if it makes you feel better — but let’s not let its lessons for us be lost.

ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Twitter: @benkritz

Source: ManilaTimes