The Long Shadow of Covid-19

This worthwhile discussion considers some of the lasting health impacts of COVID-19 and its potential economic implications.


Here is a link to the slides.

Also, see A pandemic after the pandemic:   insurers brace for disability claims ‘deluge’, from mental, physical strain of crisis.

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Spanish engineer extracts drinking water from air

Powered by electricity (which can now be derived cheaply from solar and wind) this is what productivity-enhancing innovation looks like.
AQUAER water condenser and engineer Enrique Veiga explained his invention this month in a Reuters video here:

“What our machine does is to replicate the cycle of water. It uses the air in the environment, our machine’s main feature is that it can work in the desert, with temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius and above with a relative humidity of 10%, 15%.”

A small machine can produce 50-75 litres a day.

The bigger versions can produce up to 5,000 litres a day.

Our goal is to help, our goal is to reach those refugee camps where there is no water to drink and give those people the chance to drink. Our aspiration is not only to produce an effective working machine but to make it useful and above all make it useful to those people that we see in documentaries walking kilometres and kilometres to get water and dig wells.”

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Three quarters of office workers still missing in NY city

As the latest COVID-19 variant (Delta) accelerates, legitimate questions arise about when a booster shot may be needed to maintain antibodies among the vaccinated and whether rich countries should be entitled to a third shot while 84% of the global population has not had the first two.  See Does the explosion of the new Delta variant mean we need a new COVID-19 vaccine?:

Worldwide, only 15.6% of people are fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data. This has many health experts concerned that high-income countries will be busy handing out booster shots while the rest of the world burns. It’s another ethical quandary, Ochando said. Distributing booster shots to the immunocompromised and elderly in wealthy countries makes sense, he told Live Science, but providing third shots to young, healthy people in rich countries is hard to swallow when only 2% of Africa’s population has been fully vaccinated, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control numbers.

One thing we know for sure is that the more the virus spreads the more its variants are likely to prove endemic.  This is one of the reasons that the exodus of workers and dwellers from major population centers may be longer-lasting than presently priced into property prices, rents and government tax collection forecasts.  “The High Beta Rich” author Robert Frank reports on trends to date in New York.

CNBC’s Robert Frank reports on New York City real estate. Here is a direct video link.

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