2022, part 1 of many
"I never think of the future - it comes soon enough. The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions."
Albert Einstein
With that in mind, every year I sketch out scenarios and try to assign probabilities to guide my course of action. I do it not in the expectation of being correct, but to be more alert and better prepared when reality inevitably diverts from my scenarios... BTW, "my scenarios" are mostly not mine: more often than not my very clever friends and acquaintances from the real and virtual world have authored or contributed to them. I'm just compiling compelling ideas and trying to distill them into something coherent. I've been doing this for a couple of years, but I'm putting it out there for peer scrutiny for the first time... Let's see how it goes... :)
COVID
The natural evolution of viruses is to become more contagious but less deadly. The sole purpose of a virus is to reproduce, and killing the host is a suboptimal outcome from the virus perspective. Omicron seems to be just that: a highly transmissible but very mild variant, which has mostly flu-like symptoms for most people. There's a chance that we all end up getting Omicron and we all survive. The natural immunity created by Omicron infection might ideally immunize from future mutations. In that scenario, Omicron would effectively kill COVID. Indeed, that seems to have happened after the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. This would be incredibly positive for the economy, the stock market, and most importantly, for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Jeremy Raper and others have influenced these views.
Will that happen? The SA experience certainly suggests that, and data from the UK, DK and other places seem to confirm it. However, it's too early to say whether Omicron will be the last letter in the Greek alphabet that the world will come to associate with COVID outbreaks or whether we'll continue all the way to Omega and further. That will depend on whether Omicron exposure will indeed provide immunity for future variants. We don't know that - a known unknown.
Further, COVID itself and the media hype (what a wonderful subject to sell news about!) created a sense of panic and governments all around the world have in my view mostly overreacted. The original policy objective was to make sure that healthcare systems can cope with COVID. Hence, some lockdowns early 2020 seemed to be justified by the horrible situation of overwhelmed hospitals in Italy and elsewhere.
But then the panic ensued and the objective migrated to trying to avoid every COVID fatality with seeming disregard for the policy cost, not only in terms of money but especially in terms of freedom, education, and notably health impact (and fatalities) on non-COVID maladies. We are still in that second derivative curve, where the COVID situation itself is one thing, but the government reactions to COVID a potentially entirely different situation. I think that for quite some time we've been in the realm of having to fear government (over-) reactions caused by COVID developments more than COVID developments themselves.
Kuppy and Erik Townsend at MacroVoices have been all over this.
My base scenario is that Omicron kills COVID over 2022 and I assign this scenario a probability much higher than consensus. Other scenarios include another couple of years of coexistence with COVID coming and going in sinus waves of new variants and ever diminishing economic and societal impact - this seems to be the consensus. Of course, things could get significantly worse with the eruption of a much more deadly variant that breaks through immunity acquired from vaccines or ,even worse, natural exposure to earlier variants - I (want to?) believe that the likelihood of such a scenario is minimal.