We should stop trying to predict the future, or even speculate about it.
Last year at this time, we speculated that the conclusion of the COVID-19 pandemic should come into focus by the end of 2021.
And by early fall, it was looking that way. At the Utility Expo in Louisville, Ky., in late September, people were behaving pretty much as they had done in 2019. By the end of the year, though, a new Omicron variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 had emerged and was threatening to wipe out all the gains that miracle vaccines had enabled.
Now, it’s too early to tell what the enduring impacts of Omicron will be. Initial reports indicate that it is far more contagious than earlier iterations of the virus but isn’t making people, especially those who are fully vaccinated, as sick as from Delta and previous variants. As this went to press, though, sufficient data was lacking to make any definitive predictions about the course of Omicron. As scientists Jesse Bloom and Sarah Cobey wrote in the New York Times in mid December, death and serious illness are lagging indicators of COVID-19. It usually takes weeks for severe symptoms to develop.
For such reasons, many countries, including Canada, have been tightening restrictions — as on international travel — that had only been relaxed for a few weeks. It has become déjà-vu all over again.
By mid January, implications of Omicron should become much clearer. Until then we can only hope for the best as we brace for the worst — as if more than 800,000 U.S. deaths from COVID by the end of 2021 hasn’t been bad enough.
One optimistic scenario is that Omicron, as a highly infectious but less harmful form of COVID-19, will become the dominant and possibly only strain and will come to resemble a form of the common cold as opposed to a deadly plague. That’s probably the best the world can hope for under the circumstances.
From the outset, it was going to take an extremely high rate of vaccination — 80 percent or more — to vanquish COVID. The infectiousness of Omicron moves that target closer to 100 percent. It’s impossible to imagine the U.S. ever reaching that figure. For the poorer nations of the world, which have so far had limited access to the vaccines, the chances are more remote. Signs abound, though, that boosters provide protection against Omicron, especially if boosters are engineered to counter the variant's prickly spike proteins. So, we have reason for optimism — but no more optimism than we had a year ago.
Last year, we also went out on a limb and predicted the U.S. presidential election would be history by January, although we did acknowledge the prospect of “something strange happening.” Of course, we now know that something very strange did indeed occur on Jan. 6 as a group of people who didn’t believe the election outcome stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Troubling as that was, the world didn’t end, although many of those involved have had their day in court and will serve prison time. That is another story that we can confidently predict will continue to unfold in 2022.
Of course, we can also predict with certainty — barring an existential threat— that the U.S. will hold its midterm elections this November even if we’d be fools to predict the outcome. History holds, however, that the party of the sitting president usually fares poorly in the midterms. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if the Democrats under President Biden do even worse than that historical trend.
One positive thing we can predict is that the $1 trillion of the bipartisan infrastructure bill the president signed this fall will begin transforming into new roads, bridges, and ports in 2022. Those expenditures will give a boost to the heavy construction industries and the makers of the machines that are going to build those structures. And indirectly all that construction will increase demand for the service and mechanics trucks, and all their accessories, that maintain and repair the equipment.
A good thing about infrastructure work is that much of it happens outdoors, which diminishes the risk of COVID contagion. So the country should be able to “build back better,” as Biden says, while also giving better versions of the vaccine a chance to turn COVID into something we can live with instead of having to risk dying from.
