2020: Things To Remember

13 min readApr 19, 2020

Were COVID-19 a ballgame, April 2020 marks the third inning. We have to relieve the lockdown; see that has consequences; resume an evolved lockdown for Fall; see the human death toll and take this seriously; play for time; get the vaccine; get angry about how long it takes to get vaccine; then we’re back to the new normal. Have you ever had cancer? Have you gone through a divorce? The post-game and the pre-game of the COVID-19 era are going to look alike to some degree, but they are not going to be same. We’re going to be changed. That’s okay. We need to remember what we were suffering under before COVID-19 hit. We need to remember what was said to be impossible. We need to remember what suddenly became possible. We need to remember that we can make the impossible possible.

In the era of the Spanish Flu, the world was wrapping up The Great War. That war redrew the maps of the world. It handed over territories from the dismantled Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of Versailles created Iraq. Recall how much fun we’ve had with Iraq in the last 50 years. In 1920, personal income tax was temporary measure introduced to fund the war effort. We didn’t have social programs. Because of longevity being what it was, we didn’t need them. In 1920, the life expectancy was 54.6 years for women and 53.6 years for men. Ninety-three percent of the COVID-19 deaths have hit those aged 60+. Were COVID-19 to have come in 1920, much of its lethality would not have played out. Much like some cancers emerge late in life, or Alzheimers’ affects older people, the problem is a side effect of our wins in life expectancy. Beyond lifestyle, our world was much less connected: almost everyone traveled by boat or rail over the course of days; telecommunications were almost non-existent by today’s standards; the world has almost 8,000,000,000 people today but had less than 2,000,000,000 people in 1920. Beyond the statistics, our mindsets and priorities were very different. Stand-up any 2020 society next to its 1920 version and you will find two cultures with very little in common.

We’re going to get through COVID-19. Europe got through the Black Plague when it killed 1-in-3 people. The lethality of this is so much less it’s not remotely comparable. There will come a 2021, a 2022, etc.. How we get through it is the question. What we look like in 2022 and forward is the bigger question. Going forward, here are some things to remember that we’ve seen change in just a couple months. These slid from impossibilities to reality in days.

Some of us can work from home. I am an extreme example. I work with people from all over the globe. I work on projects housed all over the globe. It makes sense that I work from home. Our society discovered that there is a weak impetus for office workers to go into the office. They don’t need to lose the commute time. My stepmother used to have to travel 2+ hours per day to look at digital copies of photos and x-rays. Why was that ever needed?

We can solve gridlock through telecommuting not bike lanes. We all live by a schedule. When that schedule commands us to travel from the office to the house, we do it and there is excess demand. Gridlock follows. Buses and bike lanes cannot satisfy that demand. Politicians kept autoplaying the old refrain of “We’ve cannot build our way out of our transportation problems ” — then they proceeded to build bike lanes and bus-only lanes. The politicians failed us on this. The biggest way to satisfy a problematic demand is to remove the demand.

The commute is killing the planet. We could fix the environment through telecommuting. By keeping a lot of office workers home, we could save carbon, time, and quality of life pressures. Measurements from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite show that during late January and early February 2020, levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) over cities and industrial areas in Asia and Europe were lower than in the same period in 2019, by as much as 40%. (link to source in the footer).

Office space is still good real estate. If we do shift away from need office buildings downtown, we could turn that space into living space. Victoria’s Hudson Bay was converting into The Hudson, a residential project with retail on the main floor.

Those people who show up to work places deserve to be paid more. I think Trump got elected because of Obama’s strive to shift to a high-tech future of good paying jobs. People like to do something with their lives and they want to feel, at some level, like their lives have meaning. People are capable of striving, but struggles are hard and something that’s hard may not be fun. Since the tech boom kicked off, there has been a persistent pressure: go for the high skills job and good pay cheque. This upwards pressure made a vacuum at the core of our economy: the ordinary Joe. We shaped our economy around the high paying jobs: houses were price to be 5–7 years of a high-tech worker’s whole income. At the same time, that made the same house suck down 20–30 years of burger flipper income. A high-tech worker with a 30-year mortgage can cope with the current housing prices. A burger flipper would need to carry the debt amortized over 120+ years for it to have the same impact on their lives. That’s not fair. We’ve attached personal worth to the job and income to that worth. The social narrative that a good job was a good paying job drove people to strive. Some people don’t want night school and student debt: they just want to live their lives. There is nothing wrong with that mindset, but we look down on people who don’t “go anywhere with their lives.” We’re all going somewhere: some people detour into higher education for years and years; and some do not.

A burger flipper is not a lessor person but their income says otherwise. In the last two months, we have seen that the only thing keeping the wheels on the road of our society are the in-person workers and they are not getting paid enough. We have a way to pay them what they’re worth.

The government can help us stay alive. We’ve seen the delivery of services and the social safety net pale.The holes in the net got bigger. The exceptions to coverage became more broad. Government became more and more hands off while taking more and more from us. When government ordered businesses to shutter to limit contagion, they knew they needed to step up with some sort of compensation. The economy of 2020 is very different from that of 1920. The divide of rich v. poor is greater; more jobs are office jobs requiring in-person contact; we had more social services in play; we have more seniors who both are not work and are at-risk. If government didn’t step in with a big cheque book, we would find our own solutions to these problems: looting, social unrest and maybe an overthrow of the governments. No? Wind Canada back to February: rail lines and other transportation modes were being paralyzed through protests. If governments are not useful, they are not needed.

Spain was the second worst hit country, still they are going to resolve the economic problems through universal basic income. Italy had the most deaths per capita. Spain was close behind. In response to the social and economic issues, Spain is rolling out a universal basic income (link to source in the footer). A universal basic income can be funded through the combination of a few moves by a government:

Ramp up the GST to something like 10%. Poor people will consume less and pay less GST, but affluent people will buy more and pay more dollars.
Tax the banks and close their loopholes. Canadian banks profited $45,000,000,000 in 2019. They can’t get by with say, $15,000,000,000 instead?
Wealth taxes. Income tax taxes workers. Income tax does not tax the rich. People who work less and have more benefit from the current system. No billionaire needs more than one billion dollars.
Resource levies. We subsidize resource extraction companies (oil, gas, mining). First, stop those subsidies. Second, take a big cut of those natural resources to fund people.

If Spain can be heavily impacted by COVID-19 and still roll out UBI, we can do it, too.

Government is able to help business. After seeing government programs spin and spin, but do little to help business, I’m really happy to see businesses get funding and get it quickly.

Going online has saved some businesses. So many businesses poo-pooed going online. Going online with business processes gives businesses a means to survive even when there is no staff and their customers cannot walk into their storefront. (link to more on the topic in the footer).

Governments and industry are going to pull a fast one when we’re distracted. All of the news has been dominated by COVID-19. What we have been missing is the long list of other things that happened while we were self-isolating and considering masks.

Kosovan government falls amid global pandemic
Eight German neo-Nazis convicted of planned attacks
Dutch state condemned by court to pay over colonial crimes
Hungary’s Orban seeks to extend state of emergency indefinitely
Trump rolls back environmental rules
Migrants ‘killed’ at Turkey-Greece border after Turkey encouraged them to cross from Turkey into Greece.

Closer to home, instead of going to a mail-in ballot and risk the election of a councilor who didn’t align with the rest of the council, Victoria BC cancelled a municipal byelection. In an era when the impossible because reality, sweeping a democratic election under the rug doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

We love bread. Who doesn’t love the smell of baking bread? After so much demonization of bread, flour and carbs, people have stripped the flour shelves bare and turned to their kitchens for comfort food, chief of which is bread.

A Victory garden started in March of 2020.

We can grow our own food. After stripping the shelves of toilet paper, hand sanitizer and flour, people turned to the garden centers. Growing food is a long, slow play but it’s rewarding. It frees us up from the supply chains that could break in the coming months. It shifts the responsibility of our food security onto ourselves.

We can almost end mass shootings in America and we did it in two months. Mass shooting were a fixture in the US News. They were random and indiscriminate: schools, churches, malls, restaurants — nowhere was safe. When the lockdowns started, the random killings stopped. This isn’t to say that we’re safe: there are still mass shootings of people in disputes and crimes gone awry; and domestic violence is up by an estimated 300%. Random shootings have largely disappeared in the US. The rampage in Nova Scotia that killed 16 people was a sad counterpoint to this. (link to source in footer).

COVID-19 mostly kills sick people. The modeling says that about 70% of the population is susceptible to COVID-19 and will get it unless a vaccine is introduced. Of those who get it, about 3% will die. Of those who die, 93% of them are elderly and/or have pre-existing conditions. That all says that some populations will be prone to dying from COVID-19 and some will be unlikely (as a population example) to die. I had a friend with Cystic Fibrosis. By his 30’s, he had exceeded the lifespan predictions of CF. I was really fearful of seeing him while I was sick. I didn’t want to be guy who killed him. Most people can carry COVID-19 to others and it’s important to not kill someone through your actions.

We don’t need Internet influencers and celebrities. While we all sought solace, the glamorous photos and videos from beautiful people started to matter less. In part, we may have resented their exotic locales that backdropped their lifestyles. In part, we may have seen them as hollow do-nothings. Madonna took to a rose-petal bathtub to offer us solace. We realized that we don’t need solace from celebrities. I think they may have realized they need us more than we need them.

Those waiting periods from companies are bogus. We needed the free flow of capital to survive. Companies like Paypal would hold money for a few days before transplanting the deposit. Where did that hang? Why did it hang? Well: the waiting period is gone and we should remember that it never had to be there.

The bandwidth caps on our Internet are bogus. Telecommunication providers have sold us packages tied to speed and monthly bandwidth. When everything hit in March, workers were sent home and took their meetings to Zoom, Skype, etc.. Telcos removed their bandwidth limits. I think that was two fold: first, the limits were imposed and not real; second, with everyone on at the same time, the quality was going to plunge (that’s how the Internet is). Service providers are making scads of cash. Without the limits in place, they are still making scads of cash.

Expensive energy is a sham. Coincidentally when the lockdowns started, Russia and the Arab OPEC nations got into a feud over oil prices and supplies. They flooded the world with oil, dumped demand and the price plummeted. We still don’t have a clear answer about peak oil, but for the price to fall off a cliff, it says that we don’t have a real supply problem, only manufactured problems. No matter how cheap oil gets, we still need to get away from oil and stop having our chains yanked by OPEC and Putin.

Most of us were living precariously. The shutdown and stay at home could have played out as a super-lame staycation: we sit at home, do some repairs, do some day drinking and relax on hygiene for two weeks. The problem: people could not interrupt their income for two weeks, let alone two months. The guideline of having three months of savings in the bank for an unforeseen emergency isn’t how we’re doing things. Instead, we’re maxxed out and this bump in the road has had severe consequences.

Most of the businesses were very precarious. For all of the shame heaped on precarious households, businesses themselves were worse off. The squeeze of high property prices, high taxes and mail order from Amazon has made their margins razor thin. With little time to adjust, they had to close up shop.

Our supply chains are not that good. Market consolidation has centralized processing and manufacturing. One beef processor in the US shut down because of workers with Coronavirus and 20% of North America’s beef supply is now uncertain. Hand sanitizer was ubiquitous until March and now it’s rarer than hen’s teeth. Locally, national chains are seeing more bare shelves than small retailers and small local chains. That a company with 200–300 stores has prolonged shortages says that their supply management is hindered by their size.

Every country needs to manufacture more inside of their own borders, their own communities. Manufacturing and manufacturing jobs have been moved to jurisdictions with low wages and poor working conditions. Those countries have other challenges and, often, those countries are 5- 10,000km away. When need an immediate supply response, the supply chain cannot deliver. It’s made all the worse by Trump who is sparking up trade disputes to redirect supplies and equipment. All of this could be remedied if we stayed on shore as much as possible. In place of underpaid workers, we could deploy tight processes to deliver goods at the lowest possible cost. We could automate most of the processes needed in a given product manufacture. Good examples locally came from the Nezza Naturals and Phillips Brewing. They teamed up to supply hand sanitizer. Phillips took back tapped kegs of beer. Usually, undrinkable beer would be discarded. Instead, its distilled for its alcohol (links in footer).

Businesses could have imposed purchase limits but they did not. COVID-19 has been a simmering topic since December. Retailers needed to pay attention to the potential for hoarding and profiteering. Instead, they sat on their hands as people wheeled out shopping carts full of meat and hundreds of packages of Clorox wipes. These retailers were looking to make a buck. They did that at the expense of our safety and well being.

Some businesses are bad actors. In amongst all this, some retailers and businesses have done nothing to help us. Some have profiteered, jacking up the prices and manipulating supplies. One dollar store sold masks for $100 per box. Tim Horton’s is forcing their workers to work unless they get a doctor’s note. Some of the Tim Horton’s ignored social distancing and capacity rules.

Banks did nothing to help us. Our economy started the year on a shaky foundation. We are nickeled and dimed to death. Retailers are getting shaken down for merchant fees. Our service fees and interest payments fueled the $45-billion profit that Canadian banked pulled in last year. Understand profit: the banks can make all sorts of mistakes and have all manner of sloppy processes but they still cover their operating costs and still pocket $45-billion in a year. That’s our money: $45-billion stacked next to 30-million Canadians means that every Canadian shelled out in excess of $1500 in 2019 to contribute to the banks’ profits. Government has encouraged banks to help their customers. Some banks are allowing mortgage holders to defer payments for six months — that doesn’t stop the clock on the debt or interest, it only kicks it down the road six months. In six months, we’re going to be into the second wave of COVID-19. All of those home owners are going to be hit with a big bill just in time for the next shut down and in time to lose their homes in December. Merry Christmas. Remember what banks didn’t do.

We have a little bit of time. Remember most of all: we have a little bit of time to fix some of these bigger problems. The US is talking about re-opening, other jurisdictions are planning the same. By July, we may be back to some kind of normal and will have put this long behind us. The second wave is coming during the next cold and flu season in the Fall of 2020.

Remember: we can make some fixes before it gets too late.

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2020: Things To Remember

Written by Shawn DeWolfe

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