covid times

Big numbers have sadly been a big part of the pandemic. Yesterday, the US reached a staggering milestone, surpassing 500,000 known corona virus-related deaths. It’s a lot higher than any other country in the world. It’s impossibly hard to imagine death on such a huge scale, yet that’s the cold, hard truth. It means that more Americans have died from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.

“The magnitude of it is just horrifying”

One professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University who modelled the spread of the virus, says that the scale of loss was not inevitable. He says the high numbers show a failure to control the spread of Covid-19 in the United States. “It’s been a failure,” he said.

The United States is overrepresented for global Covid deaths. And we just weren’t prepared to see a sophisticated, modern country brought to its knees by a pandemic. JohnsHopkins reports that the United States has about 20 percent of the world’s known Covid deaths, despite having just 4.25 percent of the global population.

By Monday this week, the USA was reporting about 1,900 Covid deaths per day. Last year, when the world first heard numbers like this, we were appalled and horrified. After a peak in January of more than 3,300, I guess once again we’re becoming inured to big numbers.

Lower daily death rates are a relief, but it’s difficult to project the future of the pandemic due to the rise of new highly transmissible variants. Historians caution that the world must not turn away from the scale of the loss, as these are the numbers – the statistics – that will be remembered decades into the future.

Part of being human is trying to understand the reality around us. A bit like that image of a duck madly paddling beneath a smooth pond surface, we’re constantly processing and interpreting and trying to make sense of everything. Our brains are working hard, and there’s a lot going on below the surface.

It’s probably not that surprising, then, that the pandemic triggered a mass event. A global existential crisis. We humans are the only species that question the meaning of life and some strange things (or maybe not-so-strange) things have happened.

The BBC has a cool story about escapism and how it helps human process the big stuff of life. Apparently, people like to see the things they’re facing mirrored back to them either as entertainment or in the media. It helps them to process new, confronting things and ticks the relatability box.

Humans want to see characters facing the same challenges or going through the same things that are happening in real life. We’ve all fallen victim to listening to sad music after a break up. We like to validate our feelings.

So the trend in watching pandemic movies isn’t a new thing. And it’s not unique, it just started happening on a global scale.

In March 2020, the 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion started trending in the US across Amazon Prime Video, iTunes and other on-demand platforms. As the pandemic hit, people were suddenly in very unfamiliar territory. It was an unprecedented situation. The director of Denmark’s Recreational Fear Lab (yes, that’s actually a thing), researches the psychology of horror media. 

His explanation? “No one alive had never seen anything like the pandemic”.

We just needed to see it up on the big (or small) screen to help us understand our new Covid reality.

I’m writing a second post about Clubhouse not because it’s directly related to Covid as such, but because it’s riding the social wave of the pandemic. Or, perhaps the digital wave, which is more like a tsunami. Launched on a platform of innovation (being audio rather than images or text), the app has created something new and engaging in the age of lockdowns.

This new app – and it really is new, only one year old – is going gangbusters. The Financial Times reports that Clubhouse is the fastest-growing social media app in the world that has been ‘willed into virility’ by a tight-knit band of Silicon Valley insiders.

It’s gained so much traction in such a short while, that yesterday it was banned in China. That kinda reveals its influence and reach.

“for a little while, the social media platform Clubhouse provided the rare opportunity for cross-border dialogue on contentious topics free from the country’s usual tight controls” – New York Times

And that facebook is trying to clone its audio chatroom style speaks volumes about its potential. And that it’s seen as a competitor or threat. I guess it will soon buy Clubhouse, and gobble it up into its large facebook fold.

Exclusivity continues to be the main theme. Smartcompany says the only way to gain access is to be invited by a current user. But here’s the thing, users only get two invites per account.

So demand for invitations exceed supply.

Honestly, what could go wrong? It sounds like a very exclusive yet noisy place with a lot of people standing on their respective soap-boxes. By all reports, it’s important to build your credibility on Clubhouse. You create a virtual chat room where people can listen to things you have to say.

‘But the key is you’ve got to come at it with both relevance and authenticity.’

One user says ‘everyone is on Clubhouse to give value, and this authenticity translates directly into followers’. Just saying, isn’t that an oxymoron? Or power to the masses?

It seems the old social media chestnut is right at home here. ‘Be your best self‘.

And apparently the world values that, because in January 2021, Clubhouse raised a further $100 million against a revised market value of one billion dollars.

Do drop in.

It’s quite amazing how artists and other creatives respond to the pandemic.

To mark the ten millionth vaccination in the UK, artist Luke Jerram has made and released a glass sculpture of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine.  He tested positive to Covid-19 in November.

What might usually be considered miniature, or at least small, the 34 cm sculpture is in fact one million times larger than the actual nanoparticle. In a nod to scientific glassware, it’s created from borosilicate glass, the same glass used for test tubes.

To help communities badly impacted by the pandemic, funds raised from the sale of five limited editions of this artwork will go to global charity Médecins Sans Frontières.

“When I created a sculpture of Covid-19 back in March, little did I know I’d later be among those to contract the virus. It’s an awful disease and two months on, my sense of smell is shot, I have tinnitus and still feel tired at times.

“During my recovery, it became clear to me that my next artwork should focus on the vaccine, our way out of this global crisis, as a tribute to the scientists and medical teams who have been working collaboratively across the world to fight the virus.

“It’s brilliant that such effective vaccines have been created in such a short space of time and that here in the UK we’ve been able to role them out so quickly. However, the fight against the disease is a global one, which is why I wanted to support Médecins Sans Frontières, through the sale of these sculptures.” – Luke Jerram

Covid hasn’t left the front pages since it arrived on the world stage in January 2020. There are so many key issues; impacts on travel and trade, vaccine development, surging case numbers, public health responses and economic fallout. New highly transmissible variants are causing a lot of alarm. Now there is a U.S. requirement for travellers on international flights to present a negative test before boarding their flight. This poses a problem for people trying to get tested overseas.

Going above and beyond, Hyatt has announced it would offer free Covid-19 testing at 19 of its resorts across Mexico, the Caribbean and South America.

This service aligns with Hyatt’s purpose to ‘care for people so they can be their best’. It falls under the banner of safety first, wellbeing always. Along with mask-wearing and social distancing, Hyatt will now offer ‘complimentary on-property testing’.

Apparently other hotel chains will offer the same. It’s great to see hospitality and tourism sectors looking at ways to support their guests, because let’s face it, that industry got slammed by Covid-19. And with some many changes to manage in day-to-day life, people need a holiday more than ever.

Now there’s more than complimentary snacks and wi-fi on the menu. There’s complimentary testing.

It’s pretty nuts that the first time you hear about something, it already has a market capitalisation of US$100 million. But that’s the pandemic for you, things just run away. Think of ‘Blinding Lights‘ family dance videos on TikTok. Actually, think about TikTok itself.

The link between the surge in downloads of the TikTok app and the coronavirus pandemic is pretty easy to see. Under lockdown, consumers spend much more time on their mobile phones looking for entertainment.

In December 2019, TikTok had 507 million users. By August 2020, it passed the 2 billion global downloads milestone. TikTok reported nearly 700 million monthly active users in July.  The short version is, its American user base has increased by 880% since January 2018.

Stay-at-home orders and lockdowns forced people to make their own entertainment, work and socialise online. Zoom literally went zoom. The Zoom share price exploded in 2020 thanks to the pandemic, as there was a global surge in demand for teleconferencing with the sudden rise in working and studying from home. Market analysts say Zoom stock went on an ‘extremely bullish run from March onwards as the health crisis really became a global issue’.

And now there’s Clubhouse. It was only launched in 2020. Apparently it’s an invite-only social app. Mashable says ‘you might have heard of Clubhouse by now, but it’s unlikely you’ve joined.’ Vogue is talking it up, creating a buzz. Be there or be square.

“a dizzying bringing together of live podcast-style conversations, panel discussions, networking opportunities (some savvy people are already swapping ‘influencer’ for ‘moderator’), the social-media app mimics real-life interactions.” 

Vogue

All of a sudden, anyone who’s anyone is running workshops. But the thing is, you can’t use Clubhouse without being invited.

Turns out, it’s pretty hard to join the club.

We’ve all placed a lot of hope in 2021. Humans simply need to believe in something – and a way out of the pandemic is a priority.

The rapid development of several vaccines has provided the booster shot we needed; a boost to morale, to confidence, to governments desperately trying to navigate a way out of disaster. It’s not without challenges, of course, and the UK and other countries are now facing production and distribution delays.

Governments have set ambitious targets. The BBC says that the latest tensions over supply of the Covid vaccine shows just how fragile this issue is. There is massive global demand for Covid vaccine, but limited raw materials and constraints on manufacturing.

I’m glad we’re not going to line up for this pneumatic drill inspired vaccine gun of the 1970s. Go figure what they’re smiling about, it looks like that woman is about to get some serious staples in her arm.

Humans have rolled out mass vaccination programs before, but one of the biggest challenges this time around is that all countries need it at the same time. And they can’t all afford it. There are so many layers to this very complex problem – supply and demand, ‘vaccine nationalism’, vulnerable countries being left behind. There needs to be fair global supply.

“No-one is safe until the whole world is safe.” – Nadhim Zahawi, UK vaccine minister.

Us, everywhere. Literally.