THE SPECTATOR: Why is 2020 the fourth best year ever?

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - The world's oldest weekly magazine, Britain's The Spectator, states that it has a long and proud history of fact-based optimism, which it sometimes presents in articles published at the end of the year, confirming through statistics that a given year was positive in many respects, even if one does not get that impression when reading the news.

However, by all accounts, 2020 is not a good candidate for such an article. "The worst year ever," claims Time Magazine on its cover. To some extent, we all share that feeling. We will remember 2020 as a year of illness and death, restrictive measures that separated us from family and friends, that separated businesses from customers, causing both economic and clinical depression.

But if we take that literally, the worst year ever is the kind of statement that can only be explained by spectacularly short memory. It is only since the beginning of the 20th century (and keep in mind that "ever" is a much longer period than that) that we have experienced two world wars, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, the Gulags, and Mao's Great Leap Forward, states The Spectator.

Even if we limit ourselves to pandemics, the Asian flu of 1957-58 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968 killed a similar number of people when the world population was much smaller. If Covid-19 had been as deadly as the Spanish Flu, just a century ago, we would not have had 1.7 million deaths worldwide by now, but somewhere between 200 and 400 million. And most of those victims would have been between 15 and 35 years old.

Of course, none of this offers us comfort at a time when we are facing a new deadly virus and distancing measures, as well as unprecedented lockdowns that have grounded flights, severely impacted economies, and left millions jobless.

How much has been destroyed, and how much has been saved thanks to human ingenuity and entrepreneurial flexibility in the most difficult circumstances imaginable? Is it even fair to talk about 2020 as one of the worst years in recent memory, asks the British magazine.

For now, the data is not yet available, but we can use projections and scenarios to arrive at an approximate answer. The global economy likely fell by about 4.2 percent in 2020, so GDP per capita is realistically slightly lower than in 2017, but higher than in 2016. To reach the highest GDP per capita humanity has ever achieved, we will have to wait until 2022.

Naturally, such a recession has a devastating effect on people. According to the World Bank's baseline scenario, about 88 million people have fallen back below the poverty line due to the pandemic. If that is the case, the global poverty rate is now 9.1 percent. This is bad, but in fact, it only takes us back to the poverty rate of 2017 – which was half of what it was ten years earlier, and only a third of what it was at the turn of the millennium. If global growth continues at the same rate, we should return to the lowest poverty rate in human history no earlier than 2023.

As people lose jobs and income, many are left without the necessary means to secure food. Projections by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization indicate an increase in the global number of chronically undernourished from 8.9 to about 9.9 percent. A horrifying outcome, but it is a quarter less than in 2000.

Fortunately, the new coronavirus rarely affects children. However, the indirect effects of household income loss, the strained healthcare system, and reduced vaccination rates against common diseases will take a serious toll on the youngest.

According to a report published in The Lancet earlier this year, it is estimated that the pandemic could cause an additional 447,200 deaths in children under five years of age over a six-month period. This is based on a scenario of major disruptions to health systems, and since the picture has brightened somewhat in low- and middle-income countries in the meantime, this is almost certainly an overestimation.

But, even if this scenario proves correct, only three years have recorded lower child mortality than this year – and those are the last three years – 2017, 2018, and 2019. Even if The Lancet's projections turn out to be accurate, 2020 as a whole still recorded 1.3 million fewer child deaths than in 2010 and seven million fewer than in 1990, despite the increased world population.

The global political situation has definitely worsened in 2020, as authoritarians never miss an opportunity to impose their rule in times of crisis, but most of them are in a weaker position than is often assumed, as it is easier to promise than to fulfill those promises. We hope that 2021 will be a tougher year for dictators, as vaccines help us change direction, and people will once again demand that society open up.

Our rapid scientific and technological response to Covid-19 is the most important reason to believe in the future. Optimism is not the belief that problems and disasters do not happen. Instead, optimism is the belief that the growth of knowledge and technological capabilities gives us increasingly impressive tools to solve the problems and disasters we will face, writes The Spectator.

We saw proof of this in 2020. It took humanity 3,000 years to develop vaccines against polio and smallpox. Moderna designed a vaccine against Covid-19 in two days.

If we had faced this new coronavirus in 2005, we would not have had the technology to even conceive of such mRNA vaccines. If the virus had appeared in 1975, we would not have had the ability to read the virus's genome. If the pandemic had occurred in 1950, there would not have been a single ventilator on the planet. And if we had suffered from this pandemic before the internet, our economy would have completely collapsed, as would our social relations.

2020 may not be the best year ever, but it is certainly, as Tony Morley said, "the best year to survive the plague.".

In short, this disease would have been worse in any other era, and the progress in recent decades has been so rapid, and human creativity under pressure so impressive, that even major setbacks only set us back a few years. Only three years in history have been better in terms of GDP per capita, extreme poverty, and child mortality – 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Far from being the worst year ever, 2020 was the fourth best year in human history, The Spectator concludes in its article.