2021: Year of the Post-COVID Bounceback

O ut with a year of calamity, and in with a year of recovery. We conservatives may not be thrilled about the new president, or about the possibility of Republicans’ losing both of the Georgia Senate runoffs. But the threat of COVID-19 is going to shrink rapidly during the first half of 2021, and the economic recovery should speed up bigly.

I, for one, hate 2020 more than I hate Democrats.

The vaccines are the game changer. There are several of ’em out there, with two already being administered and both estimated to be about 95 percent effective. Barring some disaster, the only real questions will be how long it will take the new shots to neuter this virus and how to ensure that their effectiveness doesn’t fade over time.

To be sure, this will be quite a process. For the existing vaccines, each person needs two shots about a month apart, and some states have been embarrassingly slow getting started. Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of a winter wave that the vaccines came too late to prevent, and a new strain of the virus already identified in Colorado seems to spread more easily. But it’s finally possible to map out how all this will end.

In rolling out the vaccines, every state is making its own decisions — especially after the federal Centers for Disease Control famously discredited itself with a botched (and now scotched) recommendation to make the elderly less of a priority because they’re disproportionately white. But to generalize a bit, the plan is to vaccinate health-care workers and those in long-term-care facilities first, followed by the rest of the elderly and essential workers.

A whopping 40 percent of COVID deaths have been among long-term-care residents and staff. And in terms of age, 60 percent of the deceased have been above the age of 75, with another 20 percent between 65 and 74. Vaccinate those folks, and the death rate plummets enormously.

From the existing studies, we can be confident that the vaccines prevent symptoms and deaths among those who have received the shots. It’s also likely, though, that they prevent transmission to some degree. There are promising signs of this for some of the vaccines, and we know that asymptomatic infections spread less than symptomatic ones do.

That’s the benefit of giving people with lots of social contacts — such as essential workers — some preference over the general public. If we can stop the virus from spreading, and not just from killing those it infects, even those who haven’t been vaccinated can benefit from these early injections. Failing that, the general public could start getting vaccinated as soon as February or March, anyhow, if America gets its act together.

Over the coming months, then, we should see a steady decline in the virus’s death toll and possibly its rate of spread, culminating in the availability of a vaccine to everyone who wants it. It will become progressively harder, and ultimately impossible, to justify the restrictions we’ve all been struggling with this year — the school closings, the limits on businesses and gatherings, eventually even the masks.

There will still be questions about how long immunity lasts and whether further shots (or an update to the vaccines) will be needed later. But while the professionals sort that out, the rest of us can, yes, get back to normal.

That’s going to be incredible news for an economy we’ve been holding together with deficit-funded stimulus. Congress just got around to passing another round of relief for the unemployed, small businesses, and the general public, leading Goldman Sachs to up its GDP-growth prediction for the first quarter of next year from 3 percent to a cool 5 percent. But around the time the extra unemployment dollars expire in spring, government spending can hopefully give way to normal economic activity.

Since April, we’ve seen gradual improvements in economic indicators as states have reopened to varying degrees, but everything has been hampered by the ongoing threat of the virus and our sometimes-overzealous response to it. (Improvement has generally been slowing, too.) The unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent in February, shot to nearly 15 percent two months later, and remains elevated at nearly 7 percent. There are still about 10 million fewer employed Americans today than there were before COVID hit.

There is, in short, a lot of damage left to repair, and shaking off the virus is our best hope to turbocharge that process.

So here’s to a better year.