Well, it’s been quite the start to 2021 so far. Nobody really needs reminding that barely a week into the year, an attempted insurrection happened at the U.S. Capitol. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic continued pretty much unabated. As if 2020 hadn’t been bad enough.
It might seem hard to believe right now but things should get better in 2021. The return to better times, though, isn’t happening in a straight line. It will be a series of a few steps forward, some steps backward, and more steps forward again.
On Feb. 5, just before the deadline for this edition, the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University reported 4,941 deaths in one day. At the time, it looked all but certain that total U.S. deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic would soar beyond half a million by the end of February. A sign of good news is that infections and hospitalizations have been dropping.
The fear is, though, that they’ll rise as more contagious variants the virus spread. Another worry was that too many people would ignore warnings against gathering for Super Bowl celebrations in the same way they ignored warnings about gatherings during the Christmas holidays.
Unfortunately, ignoring the advice of experts has become a national pastime in most of the Americas and Europe.
Meanwhile, over in China, things have returned to normal, more or less, and the economy is again growing at an annual rate of six to seven percent. Of course, China also fumbled the pandemic at the outset, which no doubt contributed to the pain the rest of the world is now enduring. But then China used its authoritarian muscle to take strident public health measures such as sharp lockdowns and widespread testing to bring the virus under control. It seems ironic that U.S. supporters of authoritarian ism, like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, also tend to reject public-health measures like mask-wearing.
That isn’t to say that China’s communist/totalitarian/quasi-fascist government is a superior political system. As Churchill once noted, western democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. However, after its early missteps, China has taken the pandemic seriously and put its deep state to work to implement best practices. Other countries with non-repressive regimes like Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, and Iceland have also done well with the pandemic. It no doubt helped that many of them are islands with smaller populations. But Britain is also an island. And look how it’s doing.
Somehow, despite exhausting all other possibilities before doing what needs doing, the people of the world are going to get through this. In the U.S., more than 30 million doses of vaccine had been administered by early February, with signs that the rate of vaccinations will ramp up as production difficulties are overcome and more vaccines receive emergency approval.
Nevertheless, it will likely take until fall before the pandemic is beaten down unless people suddenly agree to do the small things they’ve been asked to do to bring things under control. Don’t hold out hope for that.
In Alberta, Premier Jason Kenney, about as conservative as a politician can be, felt it necessary to explain publicly that the province’s recent lockdown measures weren’t part of a vast conspiracy to “reset” the world economy. Kenney actually has in the past criticized “The Great Reset” notions of German engineer Klaus Schwab, describing them as a “grab bag” of leftist ideas promoting more government and less freedom. But Kenney made it clear that fighting the pandemic has nothing to do with any such nonsense.
By the way, Kenney also vociferously opposed new President Joe Biden’s decision to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline. That’s irrelevant to defeating a pandemic. However, the pipeline is a chess piece in another great global dilemma that governments of the world will have to reckon with once the pandemic is over. Dealing with climate change will prove far more politically divisive than confronting COVID-19.
The climate crisis poses an even slower moving yet insidious threat than a novel virus. Yet in both cases, the brightest minds on the planet know exactly what needs to be done. And they know how to figure out ways to do that without destroying modern civilization. As an old Chinese saying goes, those who think something cannot be done shouldn’t interrupt those who are doing it.
