“In 2021, the pandemic has dominated our lives since day one. We’ve all had to adapt to a ‘new normal’, although what that looks like is different for every person. For me, the result has been a year spent mostly online.”
— Bill Gates
“2021 was an incredibly hard year for many people, including me, but I’m hopeful that 2022 will be better.” That is Bill Gates writing in his Gates Notes.
He writes that “like many people, there were entire days this year when the only human interaction I had was through a screen. The result has been the most unusual and difficult year of my life. (I suspect a lot of the people reading this might say the same.) 2020 had a brief period of relative normalcy before COVID-19 upended everything. In 2021, the pandemic has dominated our lives since day one. We’ve all had to adapt to a ‘new normal’, although what that looks like is different for every person. For me, the result has been a year spent mostly online.”
He mentions that all he did was online whether it was meetings or playing bridge with friends online or hang out with them over video chat. Once he got vaccinated, he started having some small in-person get-togethers, but his social life remains a lot more digital than it used to be.
He says that the whole experience has been “a strange and disorienting” and goes on to mention that his “personal world has never felt smaller than it did over the last twelve months”.
However, at the same time, he writes, this year was “a reminder that our world is more connected than ever. 2021 was full of monumental events with global repercussions, including extreme weather events, the ongoing effects of the pandemic, and America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Every time you looked at the news, you were reminded of just how significantly something happening on the other side of the world could affect you at home”.
He says that he had written in 2020 that “we’d be able to look back and say that 2021 was an improvement on 2020. While I do think that’s true in some ways—billions of people have been vaccinated against COVID-19, and the world is somewhat closer to normal—the improvement hasn’t been as dramatic as I hoped. More people died from COVID in 2021 than in 2020”.
“I think 2022 will be a year when many of us finally settle into a post-pandemic new normal. For me, that will mean going into the office a bit more as COVID cases hopefully go down,” he writes and goes on to say that all of us will “find a way to create new routines. There’s no question that the pandemic will create huge, lasting changes that will take years to fully understand, which can feel scary”
“Because of the Delta variant and challenges with vaccine uptake, we’re not as close to the end of the pandemic as I hoped by now. I didn’t foresee that such a highly transmissible variant would come along, and I underestimated how tough it would be to convince people to take the vaccine and continue to use masks.”
But he writes, “I am hopeful, though, that the end is finally in sight. It might be foolish to make another prediction, but I think the acute phase of the pandemic will come to a close some time in 2022…There’s no question that the Omicron variant is concerning. Researchers— including a network called GIISER that is supported by our (the Gates) foundation—are working urgently to learn more about it, and we’ll have a lot more information (like how well vaccines or previous infection protect you against it) soon. But here’s what we do know: The world is better prepared to tackle potentially bad variants than at any other point in the pandemic so far. We caught this variant earlier than we discovered Delta because South Africa has invested heavily in genomic sequencing capabilities, and we’re in a much better position to create updated vaccines if they’re needed.”
He goes on to say that “it’s troubling any time a new variant of concern emerges, but I’m still hopeful that, at some point next year, COVID-19 will become an endemic disease in most places. Although it is currently about 10 times more lethal than flu, vaccines and antivirals could cut that number by half or more. Communities will still see occasional outbreaks, but new drugs will be available that could take care of most cases and hospitals will be able to handle the rest. Your individual risk level will be low enough that you won’t need to factor it into your decision-making as much”.
“I think 2022 will be a year when many of us finally settle into a post-pandemic new normal. For me, that will mean going into the office a bit more as COVID cases hopefully go down,” he writes and goes on to say that all of us will “find a way to create new routines. There’s no question that the pandemic will create huge, lasting changes that will take years to fully understand, which can feel scary”. He quotes one of his favourite authors, Yuval Noah Harari, who once wrote that, “people are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”
He ends saying that “the world has adapted to big disruptions before, and we’ll do it again”.
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