Pandemic diary: February

It's almost been a year now since the pandemic started; my first diary post was last March. The previous one was my end-of-year post, where I talked briefly about the moaning from our event industry. Sadly, a far bigger problem is the restaurant and tourism businesses, who have actually succeeded in lobbying government so hard that despite infections constantly going up and the UK variant of the coronavirus now spreading in Finland, bars and restaurants are open, and there are no effective border controls in terms of testing or quarantine. The result is that cases have barely receded from the Yuletide peak, and are going up again.

It's been demonstrated over and over again that the choice between suppressing the pandemic and protecting the economy was a false one; the countries with the most deaths also took the biggest economic hit, and quite frankly, you do need to have a very strange notion of what the economy is to be very surprised by that. All our economies run on private consumption, after all, and we're not very likely to consume much if it comes with a significant chance of catching a pandemic disease. Right now, I'm afraid we're going to be presenting Act 2 of this fallacy: to spare our hospitality industry some short-term loss, we've abandoned suppressing the pandemic - which means the long-term losses are going to be much greater than they would otherwise have been. In money and in lives.

So far, Finnish pandemic policy has been a weird ride. First we were very slow to take any of this at all seriously; we even had officials telling us that Finland won't be affected at all. We were very late to recommend facemasks or anything like that. Then our government did take action, and as a result of that, the total deaths and economic damage are still of a different order of magnitude than, say, Sweden. But now it looks like our social democrat-led government has decided that the hospitality business is more important than national health, and we'll all be paying for it.

We're also making a fairly big bet on the vaccination program being a success. If it isn't, we may still be dealing with this pandemic next year.

In personal terms, I've already had one lecture course cancelled, and have started teaching business school prep online. The way things look right now, I feel like the only reasonable course of action is to assume that we're not going to be able to teach live all spring. Which absolutely sucks, but here we are. The worst-case scenario in terms of my work is that we're going to stay remote all spring, spend another summer pretending the pandemic went away, and lock down again in the fall. Quite apart from my working life, I would also really, really like to have a social life again, thank you very much, but at this rate that'll be something to look forward to in 2022 - or later.

To finish on an upbeat note, though, at least we've had a proper winter for once! We've had actual snow for well over a month now, with surprising amounts of sunshine. It's been a real joy, especially after the previous winter, which literally felt like five consecutive Novembers.

Stay safe, everyone.