The next 5 years

2020 has been a terrible year. But it marks the end of a decade, and it does so with a glimmer of hope. But we should always think ahead. The person you will become in five years is being built right now. So, choose wisely and boldly (at the same time) the books you read, the interactions you have, the risks you want to take, the habits you want to build - they will help you shape yourself, and become a better person. Have fun and good luck in your own self journey!

Incentives

 One of the most interesting (and rarely mentioned) dimensions of the current pandemic is about the individual incentives to testing. There are no doubts about the common good, the collective incentives for people to be tested - that will prompt a number of measures that help us to contain and mitigate some of the effects of the pandemic. But, on an individual level, the case is not so straightforward.

Of course, if you get tested and positive, you now know you have the disease, and can take specific steps to better protect your loved ones. But if you asymptomatic or only have mild symptoms, the benefits end there. There is no medical treatment you can take other than the ones you take for a common cold - hot tea and soup, good food habits, staying war - only serious patients are admitted to hospitals for a harder treatment.

On the other side, though, if you are positive, you can't leave your house and take a normal life (like you would if you had only a cold), you are subject to police visits to understand if you are really at home, you can't work from anywhere other than home (and only a handful of jobs and careers allow for this), in many cases, you lose a significant (or even all) of your income. 

When you think about it from an individual perspective, the negatives of being tested outweight the postivies - which means the probability of one a silent transmission vehicle is huge in most societies.  

2016 - 2020 - The big deception of Portuguese Government Budget

The following article from Eco (in Portuguese) is quite straightforward - a picture of the 2016 - 2020 deception on the Portuguese Government. A big (expected) and crude punch in the belly.

https://eco.sapo.pt/opiniao/a-pandemia-e-o-logro-orcamental/

Pandemic - the second wave and its pitfalls

 We are now deep in the second wave of the covid-19 pandemic. Portugal is going through a "heck of a time", amidst very tough Sanitary (the Health System is already collapsing) and Economic (severe double-digit GDP loss, unemployment strong rise and collapse of important parts of the economy) situations. As a good friend of mine put it, this is the worst crisis we are going through since the Great Depression of the end of the 20s (at least, might even end up being more severe than that one, at least for Portugal).

Very shortly, point blankly, I would like to highlight the three biggest mistakes the Portuguese Government fell into:

- Not enough planning at the right time - though the lack of preparedness for the first wave is justifiable, what we are seeing nowadays is the result of bad / non existing planning from May onwards. Several basic measures should have been taken during the Summer and were not. Just to highlight a few: in November, an integrated process and tools to manage beds occupation across the SNS (/ NHS) was still not in place; more than a thousand hospital beds were still taken by discharged patients in early November (people were discharge but remained consuming hospital resources for lack of a place to go when discharged - happens a lot with elderly people); data collection and reporting seems to be fundamentally flawed, leading to bad decision making and hampering strategic direction efforts to control the pandemic.

- No easy to access financial supports to business - the measures that are announced every week fail due to inconsistency, bureaucratic procedures that hamper implementation and party politics (the decisions to nationalize TAP and eventually the mail company are incomprehensible funds vortexes). The tourism and restauration sector have collapsed (more than 10% of GDP) and no measures have been taken to support the individual businesses - the risk of a significant collapse of the economy is real, due to domino effect on unemployment, wages, baking system, tax returns,...

- Late and inconsistent measures - every week, new measures are announced with wide implications over society. This has three deep effects: - people are lost in what measures apply to them and feel overburdened with increasingly tough measures, leading to a significant "tiredness" and low moral effect; - it is impossible for businesses to plan ahead and adjust their businesses, as they don't know what measures they need to adapt to, leading to increasingly economic losses; and finally, the incoherence of measures prevents the enhancement of its positive effects, as they are constantly being interrupted (there is a positive ramp up / curve that is not taking place, especially in terms of disease propagation rates).