As 2019 drew to an end, we began learning about a weird, unknown virus hitting eastern China. At the time, like most, my family was more focused on the upcoming year.
We were planning on growing our savings so we
could buy a new home in 2021, we were preparing to visit some close friends in
Florida, and we were looking forward to taking an international trip to
celebrate my partner’s 33rd birthday.
Then the economy collapsed as that wired little virus turned
into a monster. My partner was furloughed as Nashville shutdown, Florida became
an epicenter of the pandemic in America, and thanks to rising case numbers, many
countries won’t even let Americans visit anymore. And there’s still four months
left to go in the year.
Individual years, decades, even whole generations have been
referred to as “lost”.
During the American Civil War about 2% of the population was
killed. By one
estimate, over a fifth of all Southern men aged 20-24 died in the war. One
hundred and fifty-five years later, the American south now seems to be bearing
the brunt of COVID-19 as well.
World War I is said to have cost the “flower of European
youth”, and World War II resulted in the worst carnage imaginable. But as bad
as they are, wars are expected to cost lives and destroy families.
Unfortunately, economies can too.
During the Great Recession, approximately 10,000
people took their own lives in the US and European Union, and countless
millions had their worlds turned upside down from the hardship. Japan “lost” an
entire decade from 1991 to 2001 as economic stagnation took over and the country
couldn’t crawl its way back to the prosperity that had marked the second half
of the twentieth century.
But, from Japan’s lost decade to the lost generation of
Europe, one thing all of these examples share is that they’re local or
regional. The American Civil War was, well, American. Even a global war like
WWII didn’t actually rage across every inch of the planet. No battle was fought
in Nigeria and the harbor of Rio De Janeiro was never a prime target of
Hitler’s. COVID-19 on the other hand has swept every corner of the globe.
Unlike artillery shells whizzing by that you can hear (and even see), trillions of invisible viral bullets permeate our environment, waiting to take another victim. And in the battle against it, we have been forced to alter the lives of far more people than were ever affected by war.
From the gay couple living near Nashville, Tennessee trying
to survive the entertainment industry shutdown of “Music City USA” to the citizens
of Mumbai, India where upwards of half
the population living in its sprawling slums may have contracted the virus,
it seems no place has gone untouched.
With four months in the year left and 4.6 million US cases
already, it’s not unreasonable to suspect the United States will have 9 million cases by
Christmas, and that a million people will have died worldwide.
Economically, US GDP fell 32.9% (the worst quarterly drop
ever) and that trend is being seen everywhere. The European Union has entered
into a recession
and the World Bank predicts that Russia’s economy will contract by 6% (deepening
their economic crisis). In fact, the World Bank predicts that the global
economy will shrink by a combined
5.2%, “with the largest fraction of economies experiencing declines in
per capita output since 1870.”
COVID-19 has resulted in a lost year in more than just Brazil
or Europe or in rich countries or poor countries. It has taken away an entire
year of family plans and of people’s education and graduations, a year of
savings and a year of vacations, it has placed millions at risk of eviction and
caused emergencies throughout the medical community as routine screenings go
unperformed and patients stay at home with their chronic illness rather than
risk catching COVID-19 by seeing their doctor for regular care.
It has done this everywhere. On every continent, every country. Even in the few with no reported cases, the effects of COVID-19 have probably touched more individual lives in one way or another than any other pandemic in history.
The upshot is that while 2020 may be a lost year for many,
it doesn’t have to be a genuinely lost year in terms of the lives of thousands
and thousands of others. And COVID’s death and economic ruin doesn’t have to
carry on into another lost year and beyond.
Managing economies made up of millions of businesses and billions of customers is complicated. Managing a pandemic is actually pretty simple.
It may take a few years at a university to learn about things like
“behavioral economics” but the blueprint for controlling infectious diseases has
its foundations dating back to the Plague – the one that burned through
Europe 667 years ago.
We know how to limit the damage of outbreaks without having
a vaccine. It was done with polio, it is being done with HIV/AIDS, it has been
done with each Ebola recurrence, and it can definitely be done with COVID-19.
The specific rules may vary depending on the exact disease, but in each case those
rules can fit onto a single note card. For the current pandemic that has stolen
so much and is trying to steal so much more, the rules are basic:
1. Everyone sneezes or coughs on their hands, so
wash yours
2. Don’t make it easy to spread, so socially
distance yourself
3. Assume you have it, so wear a mask while around
others
4. And don’t let false information stand in the way
of keeping others safe
These are fundamental to stopping a disease like COVID-19,
and that’s what makes them so effective. If we collectively can’t follow such
simple tasks for the benefit of others, then 2020 won’t be the last lost year.
For my family, the jury is still out whether we will be able
to safely see our friends (as Florida grapples with continual daily case
records) or if a new house is coming next year, but we will keep looking out
for each other the way all families are supposed to.
