Glavin on the year no one predicted,
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.
On May 25, a cellphone video captured nine minutes of Floyd’s excruciating death, writhing on the ground with a police officer kneeling on his neck. American cities erupted in convulsions of mayhem and violence unlike anything in decades. That’s another thing about 2020 that wasn’t and couldn’t have been foreseen.
While millions marched in peaceful protest in the weeks following May 25, property damage and losses from the rioting, looting and arson that erupted are estimated to amount to as much as $2 billion. But that’s a pittance compared with the insurance costs exacted by 2020’s wildfires, hurricanes and floods. The insurance giant Aon reckons that at least 25 individual billion-dollar weather disasters hit the United States in 2020, an economic catastrophe exceeding $ 100 billion. And that’s just the United States. Australia’s wildfires alone engulfed 18.6 million hectares of brush and woodland. Millions more hectares of peatland and rainforest went up in smoke in Siberia. Indonesia and South America.
Not so easily calculated is the cost of the sheer loneliness so many people have endured owing to lockdowns and social isolation rules, the rupture of life’s ordinary rituals, the collapse of community vitality and the frayed bonds of common solidarity. The days just bleed into one another, and it has been like living in the verses of the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation ( also called the Apocalypse of John): the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization tracked swarms of locusts across East Africa and South Asia, threatening the livelihoods of 700 million people.
The swarms darkened the skies above India, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, Uganda and Iran. In Kenya, the swarms were the worst in 70 years — one swarm was measured at 40 kilometres long and 60 kilometres wide.
As for SARS- COV- 2 , the virus that causes the COVID-19 sickness, it would not be perfectly accurate to say that nobody saw it coming. Three months before the virus emerged in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, an independent report prepared for UN secretary- general António Guterres warned that the world was not prepared for the “very real threat” of a pandemic that could wipe out five per cent of the global economy. But Xi Jinping’s China, after allegedly learning its lessons from the 2003 SARS catastrophe, had “developed public health organizations/institutes and training programmes modelled on successful programmes and agencies,” the report concluded. It wasn’t true.
Because remembering is a necessary act of rebellion against the tyranny of the present, it is important to remember how we ended up like this, to remember that it was exactly a year ago that the first true thing about COVID-19 is known to have been uttered. On Dec. 30, 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, circulated a warning to his fellow health workers: something wasn’t right about what Wuhan’s Communist Party authorities were telling people about the strange sickness that was causing people to fall ill and die.
The lie that the authorities had been circulating for several days was that some people who had frequented an open- air “wet market” had succumbed to some sort of pneumonia.
In fact, the sickness was very much like the SARS outbreak that Chinese authorities had attempted to cover up back in 2003, and it wasn’t pneumonia, Dr. Li said. It was infectious.
On Jan. 3, Dr. Li was summoned to appear before Public Security Bureau. He was told he’d been circulating “false comments” that “severely disturbed the social order.” He was told to shut up.
Three days later Dr. Li was admitted as a patient in the hospital where he worked. He was diagnosed with the coronavirus on Jan. 30. On Feb. 7, he was dead. All along, Chinese authorities have been lying to the world about their culpability in allowing the SARS- COV-2 virus to circle the globe. And the World Health Organization’s complicity in Beijing’s disinformation operations hasn’t helped.
After months of bad- faith negotiations and stalling, a tightly- supervised WHO investigation team is finally being permitted to travel to Wuhan next month.
On Monday, the lawyer for the citizen- journalist Zhang Zhan, whose firsthand reports from Wuhan during the early days of the outbreak caused her to be arrested, confirmed than Zhang has been given a fouryear sentence on the absurdly commonplace charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Zhang has been on a hunger strike for weeks. She is being force-fed with a nasogastric tube inserted in her nose.
One should engage in divination and augury about the world’s future with some modesty, so with 2020 ending as brutally as it began — with Beijing suppressing the truth about the catastrophe that has befallen the world and punishing anyone who speaks out loud about what has happened — it should be enough to hazard this guess.
The cruelty and sadism of Xi’s regime will continue to shape the course of world events. The timid and the craven among the UN member states, most disgracefully among the world’s liberal democracies, will continue to cower and cringe. And the necessary work of picking quarrels and provoking trouble will fall to the rest of us.
THE CRUELTY AND SADISM OF XI’S REGIME WILL CONTINUE TO SHAPE THE COURSE OF WORLD.