I woke up this Saturday morning feeling unwell.

I had headache, nausea and felt fatigued. Was this the onset of Covid-19? I live in a household with three others and am also a care giver to my 86 year old mum whom I had to take to hospital at the end of the week. Not just for my sake, I needed to know whether I might have Covid-19 or not.

I called the NHS’s testing hotline and a nice lady explained that I could not have the test unless I was displaying one or more of three symptoms: a temperature, persistent cough and a loss of sense of smell. I had none of these. I could not have a test.

Otherwize, she said, too many people would be trying to get a test.

But wait, said I. Logically if I did have one or more of those symptoms, I would have Covid-19 and would not in fact need a test. The diagnosis would be self -vident, and I could immediately self isolate for ten days without bothering the NHS at all.

The problem for me – and everyone else – was I did not know whether I had it or not. (I still don’t). So I could go around spreading the disease unknowingly or I could take time off work to self-isolate unnecessarily. The great difficulty with Covid-19 as everyone knows is that carriers can be asymptomatic. (There is currently a 28 day waiting list for a test at Boots Pharmacy while Lloyds Pharmacy home testing kits take over a week to turnaround. By the time you get a result, it’s likely you have either recovered or spread it to everyone you know.)

It strikes me the government’s testing strategy is an inverted kind of survivor bias.

During World War II researchers at the Center for Naval Analysis faced a problem. Bombers were getting shot down over Germany. After each mission the bullet holes and damage to each bomber was reviewed and recorded. The researchers were looking for vulnerabilities The data began to show a clear pattern. Most damage was to the wings and body of the plane.

The solution to their problem seemed to be clear. Increase the armour on the plane’s wings and body.

The analysis is wrong

But there was a problem. The analysis was completely wrong.

Before the planes were modified, a Hungarian-Jewish statistician named Abraham Wald reviewed the data.

Wald’s review pointed out a critical flaw in the analysis. The researchers had only looked at bombers who’d returned to base.

Missing from the data? Every plane that had been shot down.

But the research wasn’t a wasted effort. These surviving bombers rarely had damage in the cockpit, engine, and parts of the tail. This wasn’t because of superior protection to those areas. In fact, these were the most vulnerable areas on the entire plane.

The researchers’ bullet hole data had created a map of the exact places that the bomber could be shot and still survive.

With the new analysis in hand, crews reinforced the bombers’ cockpit, engines, and tail armour. The result was fewer fatalities and greater success of bombing missions

Eight hundred people tested for every new case

Vietnam’s strategy takes a leaf from Wald’s book. With a playbook developed to fight SARS 17 years ago, Vietnam was early to restrict travel, put large amounts of people in quarantine and tested a massive amount of suspected cases for every new patient.

So far Vietnam has tested nearly 800 people for each new confirmed case, the highest ratio in the world according to Reuters data. Vietnam’s infection rates have remained low.

Of course, this scale of testing is easier said than done and the government has promised to ramp up testing. But a strategy of testing those with confirmed symptoms seems to miss the point of testing at all.

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Covid-19 has dealt office space its biggest blow in decades. We have seen nine years change in as many months.

In San Francisco, office space has gone from its lowest vacancy rate ever to its highest – in the same year.

Twitter, Facebook, Slack and Coinbase have all announced a move to near 100% remote working – providing cover for other companies to do this same.

Earlier this year Pinterest paid $90m to terminate their San Francisco lease. Pinterest has 88 million US users, meaning they effectively paid $1 per user to shutter their San Francisco office.

A real estate storm is brewing

Meanwhile in New York 7700 retail outlets are set to close this year at the same time as 173m square feet of office space is expected to come online. Only 59% of that has been leased.

Source: Deloitte

A storm is brewing in commercial real estate. One life-raft could be flexible office space. Google Trends show search volumes for “co-working” have held firm throughout the pandemdic.

Source: Google Trends

Real estate is the third largest source of wealth for the ultra rich. I would expect to see them move out of commercial real estate and into domestic.

Airbnb could be winners

One player could be poised to grab a large slice of the co-working pie.

Airbnb could repurpose commercial real estate. They have a demand base that is global and opportunities and supply in every work space in the world. And almost every young exec already has an Airbnb account.

They could offer flexible office space to enterprise clients that will could them from a $50bn valuation to a $100bn valuation.

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Some scientists have argued that Covid-19 is not in fact a pandemic.

“Pan” means “everywhere” and until recently Africa has barely been touched by the novel coronavirus.

Instead,  scientists have labelled it a “Syndemic” or synergistic endemic. Covid-19 is an illness that does not act in isolation but rather interacts with other underlying illnesses to cause more damage.

As it is with people, so it is with people-driven businesses.

As I write this, the UK’s pub’s remain closed due to the second Covid19-lockdown.

There is no question that pubs had to be closed. Pubs are hotspot for coronavirus transmission.  Data shows that those who tested positive for Coronavirus were twice as likely to have been at a restaurant than those who tested negative.

Which makes it all the more surprising that Rishi Sunak encouraged everyone to go out to pubs and restaurants with his Eat Out To Help Out scheme over the summer. Pubs benefitted most from this promotion., which certainly led  to the need for a third lockdown.

As restrictions are relaxed in the run up to Christmas, the government has announced pubs will be allowed to re-open – at least until last orders at 10pm. But will pubs survive.

The truth is, the Pub industry already has an underlying illness.  Before Covid-19 began rampaging around the world, the number of pubs in the United Kingdom was already dwindling, down from about 60,000 at the turn of the last century to 47,200 now, according to the British Beer and Pub Association.

The problem is that taxes are high and beer is more available than ever in supermarkets and elsewhere. A smoking ban, imposed in 2007, didn’t help. Nor did the 2008 financial crisis, which helped push the number of UK pubs down from around 50,000 to around 30,000. Analysts predict that Corvid-19 could see pubs decline a further 25% in the near future.

British people love pubs and that’s why they have survived wars and at least one plague, but can they survive the Covid-19 pandemic?

The signs are ominous. Workers in the hospitality sector have had their hours cut more than other workers. When Covid-19 is over, will they have jobs to go back to?

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Scientists agree this Xmas is a super spreader event. So it is likely more preventable deaths will occur before the vaccine is widely distributed in the UK next year. That means there will likely be more lockdowns and more economic pain before the vaccine arrives.

And although we do not know exactly when the vaccines will arrive and so when the pandemic will come under control, it is a safe bet it will be in 2021.

When that happens many analysts believe the economy will come roaring back.

The consensus predicts 50 per cent growth in earnings per share in Europe and 22 per cent in the US for next year, with the double-digit recovery extending into 2022 as laggards such as the financial and travel industries catch up.

Recovery hopes are underpinned by expected global expansion in global domestic product next year of more than 5 per cent, the best since the 1970s, with central banks too fearful to withdraw support for stricken economies.

After the 2008 financial crisis, recovery was long and slow. But the reason that recovery was slow is the same reason this one could be much faster.

Back in 2008 the bursting of the housing bubble left households with high levels of debt and greatly weekend balance sheets that took years to recover.

But this time things are different. Households entered the slump with much lower levels of debt. And it is likely there is a fair amount of pent up demand. UK citizens who remained employed did a huge amount of saving in quarantine accumulating a lot of liquid assets.

So it’s probable spending will surge once people feel safe to go out and about.

Of course, short term booms are no guarantee of longer term prosperity. That’s a whole other problem.

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