2021: Dark clouds and silver linings

Fresh hopes on the economic, health and political front temper the grim legacy of 2020

2020 was an awful year for the world, with, in round numbers, nearly 90 million officially recorded cases of Covid-19, two million deaths and a fall in world GDP by 5 per cent, the biggest drop since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thanks, largely to the rank incompetence of the Trump administration, the world’s leading superpower led the charts with more than 20 million infections and over 350 thousand deaths, six times the fatalities suffered by American forces in the 15-year long Vietnam War. 

As the new year dawned a fortnight ago, a second wave of the pandemic was raging