Welcome to Plugging the Gap (my email newsletter about Covid-19 and its economics). In case you don’t know me, I’m an economist and professor at the University of Toronto. I have written lots of books including, most recently, on Covid-19. You can follow me on Twitter (@joshgans) or subscribe to this email newsletter here.
Today, March 12, marks precisely one year since I stopped going to work and stayed at home. I wasn’t supposed to be at work anyway. I was supposed to be in Italy. But that trip had been cancelled a couple of weeks earlier. I had just returned from California the weekend before from a trip that, in retrospect, I should not have taken. On March 10 (the day before the NBA shutdown and Tom Hanks news), I had shouted at our Dean in a public forum that the school should close and that all in-building events needed to be cancelled for at least the next few months. I was rebuffed as the University still was considering the matter. The faculty took bets on when the closure would come. I had Friday, March 13 and I turned out to be right.
At home, there was nothing more for me to do. We had raided Costco at the end of February — a couple of weeks ahead of the crowd — and so had a month of supplies. We also had a big paper towel stockpile (my theory being that we specialise in one commodity and so could barter it during the end-times). At the time, we thought we might need that but some of those supplies we still have a year later. (The paper towels are all gone). The rest of my activity was reassembling the family back at home because we just didn’t know what the consequences of getting sick might be and figured we were better off together. My adult children grumbled about it. My spouse and youngest also grumbled as their Australian holiday was cut off. I was quite happy to have everyone where I could see them.
Then what?
I spent my time over the next little while lamenting not having got a haircut, slowly cancelling trips and refreshing data on Covid-19. All the while I convinced myself that I had Covid-19 then and so was checking temperature and oxygen levels obsessively. And no I hadn’t lost my sense of taste or smell but, at that time, people weren’t saying that was a symptom! The jury is still out on my self-diagnosis.
It took a week until I accepted that I wasn’t going to get any ‘real’ work done and that I should embrace the pandemic. I reviewed what my comparative advantage might be and it was pretty clear that I should write a book trying to explain the economic issues around the pandemic to anyone who would listen. I convinced MIT Press, who themselves were grappling with what to do, that we should try and do all of this in a month. We did. It was intense and crazy. It was not the work of someone who was of sound mind.
Little did I know that when I started writing on March 19 I would never stop. You might worry that writing a book might mean that you want to change a ton of stuff soon after. It turns out you do and so I wrote and MIT Press published another edition of the first one. That one allowed me to double-down on my whole “the pandemic is an information problem” thesis. The work for that finished in June and through that month and July, I wrote a couple of papers on Covid (here and here).
You would think that would have been it but I lasted about a week before I just had to continue. That was when I launched this newsletter. For the first couple of months, it was daily but that proved too much. Now it is three times a week. I keep vowing to stop when I have nothing more to write but that hasn’t happened. In the end, those newsletters helped refine my thinking further and so, of course, I published another book last month.
The difference between books and newsletters is that with newsletters I have some data on how many people might actually be reading them. By my estimate, it has a much wider reach than the books have but I don’t really know. But the fact that you and others subscribe has certainly continued to fill my writing mania. I suspect that when my subscriber numbers start to fall, I will start to stop writing.
Given all that I feel the need to forecast what the world might be like in a year’s time just to capture my own expectations at this moment in time. Here goes, in 12 months …
All of Canada, the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and East Asia will be vaccinated to the extent that demand no longer exceeds supply.
Those countries will all have endemic levels of Covid-19 which will turn out to be a shock to Australia, New Zealand and East Asia but a comfort to the rest. The shocked countries will stay cut off from the world longer than others with an intense debate but will finally realise that exposure is inevitable. They will lament the fact that other countries did not follow their policies in 2020.
Masks will not be worn and there will be no social distancing restrictions in those countries.
There will be a big surge in Covid cases amongst the young in the Fall of 2021 as it turns out many of them didn’t bother to be vaccinated in the Summer.
The research focus will move to treatments for long Covid. The US will use long-Covid as a reason to try for another universal health insurance push.
For other countries, not on the above list, vaccinations will continue and they will be supply-constrained. This will be an on-going tragedy.
We will find it hard to remember that we spent 18 months at home. After a couple of months of “gee, imagine being around people” things will go back to normal. Only a few trends will turn out to be have been accelerated. Some businesses who thought work from home was permanent will rethink that. People will lament not being able to coordinate work from home with their colleagues. Work from home Friday will be introduced.
These are all without explanation so that I have something to point to if, and I really hope this won’t happen, I am writing another reflection on the year on March 12, 2022.