Year in Review – 2020

This has obviously been a difficult year for everyone, myself included, but I do look back at the year as a mixed bag with rather a lot of bright spots. I have been incredibly lucky that from March onwards I have been able to work from home full time, so I have not been affected financially by COVID-19, and I have been able to carry on relatively as normal.

One goal I mentioned in last year’s review was that I was hoping to sacrifice less personal time to work this year, as I racked up a few hundred hours of overtime in 2020. Although I averaged less per month this year, I did still sacrifice a lot of time to work in 2020, there were a mix of causes for this. Hopefully in 2021 I will be finally able to work on that and free up some more personal time.

My mental and physical health was tested hugely this year. As I live alone it meant that I spent the first lockdown alone, and I spent a lot of the year not seeing family, friends, and I missed a lot of my nephew’s first full year. I have put on a fair bit of weight in 2020, so that is something that will be front and centre at the start of 2021. One huge positive that really made my year was that I leave 2020 in an amazing relationship, and I am looking forward to the experiences that brings this year.

Below are as usual some of my favourite things I have watched, read, written, and listened to over the last year.

The Turning Point on Coronavirus

Tonight, Boris Johnson is set to announce a slight easing to Britain’s lockdown after just 7 weeks. These changes look set to include a new set of slogans, increased exercise time, and the possible reopening of garden centres, should they be able to conform to social distancing. On social media, there has been a huge backlash towards the expected measures, and to many, this feels like the latest car crash in what has been catastrophic handling of the pandemic since the start.

As of today, Britain has the highest death rate in Europe, and the second-highest worldwide, after the US. The current figure stands at 31,587 deaths, although this is the minimum, the number is likely to be a lot higher. Should the lockdown be eased too early, this number could skyrocket to 100,000 by the end of the year, as highlighted by John Johnston for Politics Home today.

The big question on everybody’s lips is whether Britain is ready to ease lockdown, and most statistics point to no. It is important to remember that Britain was one of the last countries to enter lockdown, yet we are one of the first to contemplate easing lockdown. There is no doubt we have passed the peak of wave 1 of the coronavirus, which hit around 4 weeks ago, but the descent of the curve is noticeably much less steep than the ascent.

Modelling the daily numbers has always been difficult due to under-reporting at weekends, however, as per the government’s slides the 7-day rolling average is currently around 580, the peak was around 900-950, and we entered lockdown when the rolling average was around 60. If we model this with death per million persons in the graph below courtesy of Our World in Data, we can see there is still a long way to go to reach pre-lockdown levels.