What will 2021 have in store?

If forecasting is the art of saying what will happen and then explaining why you got it wrong, 2020 has been a year to hone the craft. A tiny tangle of RNA has upended our lives and compounded uncertainty in a world that wasn’t short of it to begin with. Our ability to peer into even the very near future has, time and time again, been thwarted by the virus – and by the unintended repercussions of our responses to it.

But prophesying is what humans do and we’re gluttons for punishment. With the value of predictions at an all-time low, there doesn’t seem to be any harm in throwing a few more out there.

The first is that the year ahead will be dominated by logistics. Billions of vaccine doses will need to be manufactured, distributed, stored and administered in an undertaking that will take years. Each stage has its own set of complications. Production is precarious because manufacture relies on intricate supply chains with hundreds of component parts. If any thread in the web breaks, tens of millions of doses could be in jeopardy.

The cold chain must remain intact to get jabs out of the factory and into patients’ arms without spoiling. Many nations just don’t have the infrastructure. And there will be a shortage of qualified staff to administer the vaccine safely.

Faced with these challenges, it’s worth remembering just how lucky we are that a finite and quantifiable problem – getting things from A to B – is the one we’re now worrying about. Vaccines normally take decades to develop. Just two months ago it wasn’t known whether finding a Covid-19 vaccine would take months or years. Humanity is going into the new year armed with half a dozen vaccines that have already been approved and many more in the pipeline.

Quality will also improve. So far, most Covid-19 vaccines have focused on generating an immune response to the spike protein – the part of the virus that allows it to enter our cells. But fascinating research conducted by the University of Cambridge is exploring the potential of using the virus’ N protein which, if introduced to the immune system in a vaccine, produces a greater antibody response. The N protein also mutates less frequently than the spike protein, meaning an N protein vaccine would be effective for longer before needing to be redesigned.

Even so, demand for doses will continue to vastly outstrip supply. The debate about how to prioritise inoculation within and between countries will shift to centre stage. Around a third of the world’s population will likely be vaccinated by the end of 2021. But as things stand, many poorer nations at the back of the queue will have to wait until 2023 or 2024.

The impact could be staggering. A study by Northeastern University in Boston suggests that if 50 rich countries receive two billion doses of an 80 per cent effective vaccine, one third of Covid-19 deaths would be prevented. Twice as many would be saved if the vaccine was instead distributed across all countries according to population.

In an effort to prevent hoarding, nearly 200 nations – though notably not the US – have signed up to the equal access initiative COVAX. The initiative allows rich states to subsidise poorer states’ vaccines, with the initial aim of vaccinating the most vulnerable 3 per cent of each member’s population.

The choice between stockpiling or sharing isn’t just a moral one. Vaccine diplomacy is poised to add another dimension to geopolitics: China and Russia, in particular, are using preferential access to their vaccines across Asia, Africa and Latin America as a bargaining chip to advance interests abroad.

Few countries will be in a position to refuse. The pandemic has knocked off 8 per cent from world GDP. The OECD has said that the global economy should regain this lost output by the end of 2021. But the recovery, like the vaccine rollout, will be complicated and patchy.

In the UK, the worst downturn in over 300 years led to a record rise in redundancies in the three months to October. Before the vaccine, hopes of a V-shaped recovery had given way to a U-shaped prognosis or even a K-shape, as different sectors begun to recover at different speeds; tech-savvy firms in the service industry on the upward arm and hospitality, retail and leisure heading downwards.

All those outcomes are possible. Well over half of the jobs lost during the pandemic have been in hospitality and retail. And further job losses have been deferred by the furlough scheme which was paying the wages of 9 million people at its peak. As it is withdrawn in the coming months the true extent of the economic fallout will become clear.

While the situation is precarious, expectations are improving. Despite the atrocious figures, many more firms are still in business than otherwise would have been thanks to government-backed lending schemes. The prospect of consumers having fun again as social distancing restrictions start to ease off in the spring has raised hopes of a spending resurgence in the hardest hit sectors.

The steep drop in GDP means the UK has the headroom for a strong recovery and an increasing number of forecasts are predicting that output will return to its pre-Covid level by the third quarter of 2021. If a difficult winter can be navigated successfully a V-shaped bounce back is still on the cards.

Of course, everything depends on how quickly the vaccines can be rolled out.

The UK has several big advantages in this respect. It has managed to secure the third highest number of vaccine doses per capita of any nation. Swift regulatory approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab gave the country a head start and now that the cheaper and more easily distributable Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been given the green light, the government has enough doses to inoculate the entire population. Geographically, the UK is fairly small, making the transportation equation a lot simpler. And the NHS has an excellent record on vaccine delivery, administering 15 million flu jabs every year.

It’s worth remembering that not everyone needs to be vaccinated for the virus to be brought under control. The best guess for the threshold to achieve herd immunity – when the spread of a disease falls dramatically because enough of the population is immune – is around 70 per cent. Given that polls show that a large chunk of the country is still reluctant to get a vaccine, this is just as well.

The immunisation programme will be a marathon rather than a sprint, and other policies will have to compliment it. We can expect the picture to remain just as messy in the coming year, a patchwork of rapid private tests, public tracing systems and social distancing set against the backdrop of an increasingly inoculated public.

Whatever its merits compared to a more targeted approach, mass testing seems to be the way things are going. Cheap, rapid antigen tests will become more useful as accuracy improves and will weave their way into our daily lives. It’s likely that visiting theatres, restaurants, stadiums and workplaces will become contingent on waiting 15 minutes for the all-clear.

Handwashing and mask-wearing are also here to stay. But the inclination towards more draconian responses should subside as the immediate threat of the virus recedes. While the most severe restrictions won’t disappear and the shadow – if not the reality – of lockdown will loom until at least the spring, these policies will likely soften around the edges. Instead, there will be pressure on the government to start trusting its citizens to follow advice rather than micromanaging every aspect of social interaction.

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What lessons will humanity learn from the past year?

As the pathogen began to wreak havoc pundits were quick to label the crisis a black swan – a low-probability, unforeseeable and catastrophically damaging event. In fact, academics and analysts have long warned of the dangers and inevitability of a global pandemic. Coronavirus, it’s been suggested, was more like a grey rhino – big, obvious, and charging towards us at speed.

The danger is that when an event like Covid-19 is seen as exceptional, those in charge of protecting us from these risks can excuse themselves. The hope is that the experience will be a wake-up call to take seriously other threats to humanity – such as hostile artificial intelligence, extreme climate change and nuclear terrorism – that until now have seemed nebulous or farfetched.

One of 2020’s most intriguing legacies will be the psychological imprint it leaves on those who lived through it. Many will start to see the virus as just another small but definite risk of everyday life, and one worth taking. For others, a year of apocalyptic news combined, perhaps, with personal tragedy and a heightened sense of vulnerability will produce a lasting change in outlook and an aversion to risk that will be hard to shift. Most will fall somewhere in the middle and find their own ways to strike a balance between living and merely surviving.

Whatever shape our new lives take, everything points to the coming year being better than the last. Much better. In 2021 we will learn to live with the virus. It will not disappear, but it will start to fade into the background. See you in twelve months’ time and I’ll explain exactly why I got it wrong.