Oh!

Zone April 25, 2020

ROLLBACK 2020
"I have always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened". Those were
the wise words of Marshal McLuhan the interesting Canadian communications theorist who is more
famous for his quip "The medium is the message". In this strange upside-down year so far, it is hard
to predict what happened yesterday! In fact, the President's predictions about the past turned out
to be fake too. When oil futures can turn negative1 we may not be far away from turning back the
clock. Who doesn't want that to happen and roll back 2020? Do you want to go back to the good
old days of Jan 1, 2020?

Have you watched Counterpart2? Berlin bifurcates because of an experiment gone wrong and there
are two parallel realities with each person having their counterpart in the alternate reality slowly
evolving independently. And then the pandemic strikes. Sometimes it does feel like we slipped into
the wrong reality. 

Where do we go from here? It depends on if you are part of the 1% rich or

“It is going to
89.6 % poor. Like all stats, 89.6% is made up but you get the point. If you disappear” -
are the 1% you probably are already happily holed out in a bunker President Trump in
near Christchurch New Zealand . For the rest of us in the middle seat middle early March.
3

class, we await our daily groceries with the dripping wet sanitizers and hope
for the best while trying to time twenty-seconds deeply scribbling our hands under the tap. We wipe
and then just in case go back for seconds. 



Talking about wiping, the topic of running out of toilet paper4 at one point surpassed even the fear
of getting infected. Biden yes, Bidet Nope. 



It seems a long time ago but it was actually early march when the fear of infection reached a tipping
point forcing governments to act. Flattening the curve5 became the new phrase. Larry Brilliant6, who
spent decades working tirelessly in India in helping eradicate smallpox has been warning about this
situation for a while. There are no shortcuts and we are forced to rethink our lives of the past 30
years. Quarantines soon took over the world as the invisible enemy started to take a toll across the
world7. 

The most difficult part of these shutdowns is that it is suffocating the millions whose daily wages are
on hold. From the slums of Bombay8 to the shacks of Sao Paulo9 it is death by virus or destitution,
the daily wage vacuum necessitated by the lockdowns, exposing the stark divide in priorities. It
is not clear how many will die of craving vs corona in these apocalyptic times for billions. David
Beasley of the World Food Program has warned of a hunger pandemic resulting from the Covid-19

Srikanth Desikan Copyright © 2020 Oh!Zone All rights reserved. 1

Oh!Zone April 25, 2020

shutdowns. An estimated 265 million across the globe

could face starvation by the end of the year if we don't
act. 

Protests have broken out in many states across the

US although it is not clear if these are organic or
orchestrated. We can't just open up suddenly for that
would result in a resurge. Many options have been
proposed10. We may be caught between the devil and
the deep blue sea and damned if we open and
damned if we don’t. 

A typical day in the United States sees over 3500 deaths from cancer and heart disease. No one
knows what has happened to those stats in the past month. Normalcy on the health front is
unknown. CV deaths are trending at 1800 per day in the past few weeks. The future is, well in
the future11. The truth is no one knows. 

Big disasters bring big bailouts. 6 trillion is being pumped. This is an order of magnitude more than
12 years ago at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Is there any accountability? Possibly minimal12.
The Paycheck Protection Program designed to help small businesses was out of money in a few
days. Public companies like Shake Shack received 10 million while many mom and pop shops
never saw their checks.



A health crises demands a president who provides medicare for all. Early in Feb most Democrats
shot themselves in the foot voting for a moderate who would get them half way there. Now it seems
bleak for we may be left with a leader who asks us to drink bleach. On a positive note, you may
want to know that Richard Gere at age 70 just had a baby13. A healthy boy. 



Stay safe, see you next week.

1 https://www.barrons.com/articles/negative-oil-prices-from-the-folks-who-brought-you-the-financial-crisis-51587549601
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series)
3https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-19/-we-needed-to-go-rich-americans-activate-pandemic-
escape-plans
4 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5xm87/we-asked-people-buying-tons-of-toilet-paper-why
5 https://www.wired.com/story/whats-social-distancing-flattening-curve-covid-19-questions/
6 https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/
7 https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
8 https://www.livemint.com/news/india/dharavi-s-economy-goes-down-the-tubes-11587152095394.html
9 https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/17/what-its-like-to-live-in-sao-paulo-the-south-american-coronavirus-epicenter/
10 https://ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-for-ethics/files/roadmaptopandemicresilience_updated_4.20.20_0.pdf
11 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/coronavirus-america-future.html
12 https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-coronavirus-bailout-repeats-2008s-mistakes-huge-corporate-payoffs-with-
little-accountability
13 https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/24/entertainment/richard-gere-baby-boy-trnd/index.html

Srikanth Desikan Copyright © 2020 Oh!Zone All rights reserved. 2