If we haven’t spoken in a while, feel free to drop me a line. It would be great to catch up. I know it feels as if it’s been a lost year for many of us. All COVID all the time.
Reviewing 2020 though, there were other things too, which feel natural to share at this time of year. Aside from the 2021 outlook, this year-end update is more in the vein of a feuilleton: lighter topics, cultural commentary, and more literary criticism.
—Looking forward to 2021. Thoughts on travel, restaurants, cinemas, cities, macro, and social/political risk going into 2021.
—Preppies in 2020. Barneys, Brooks Brothers, Bergdorf’s—going the way of Bonwit Teller? In light of these bankruptcies, a reflection on the state of apparel industry in 2020.
—Industry. One of our readers asked for an in-depth review of Industry on BBC and HBO.
—What to read and what to watch. Unable to socialize outside and with burnout, we also consumed a lot of stuff. A lot of it. These are the works we recommend.
—What I learned this year: Culinary school for the autodidact. What do you do when you can’t go to restaurants? I discuss the process of learning to cook from essentially a zero base and link to resources I’ve found helpful.
—WILTY, Part II: How to produce a video. A walkthrough of the process used to create a virtual music video.
—Further reading. Non-COVID articles worth checking out from earlier this year.
As for COVID, here’s what’s known about U.K. variant B.1.1.7 right now: while there is “no evidence to suggest that the variant has any impact on the severity of disease or vaccine efficacy” (CDC), the latest research from Imperial finds it has a multiplicative advantage of 1.74. The race to vaccinate fast enough to ensure that our public health systems don’t buckle under the stress of new cases just got exponentially more difficult.
Two factors I track primarily are the rate of COVID+ tests and the local rate of hospitalization. The positive rate not only controls for the variability in testing rates, but it’s also intuitive in terms of portraying risk.
The more granular or local the data, the better. In New York City, we have the positivity rate at the ZIP code level and hospitalizations at the county level (clicking “By borough” will reveal data series over time).
Each municipality will have different levels of granularity, but monitoring statistics in your local area can give you an idea of when you need to hunker down (e.g., PA’s 7-day positivity rate is on the Early Warning Dashboard while hospitalizations are on the main dashboard).
As for comparing risk and severity across different geographic regions, there are these trackers:
1. The COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool. It shows the probability someone in a given party would have COVID. (i.e., if there are x people present at an event, there’s a y% probability one person has it).
2. The COVID Risk Levels Dashboard, which shows new cases in the past 7 days (adjusted for population).
I know most people on this list are in financial services, but to the few of you who are in healthcare, thank you for everything you’ve done.
There are no words that can ever adequately address what happened last year. The most moving tribute I’ve seen is Peter Turnley’s collection of photographs from when New York first got hit in April.
Wishing someone a happier and healthier New Year takes on a much bigger meaning this year. I hope I’ll be able to start seeing some of you again in 2021, once we’ve all been vaccinated. Until then, stay safe and stay healthy.