The waiting game in the year of results

In the wonderful movie of Charlie Chaplin modern times, The defining image of modernity is the movement of time. Fast machines drive life rapidly in his dystopian vision. And yet it’s hard to imagine someone in a toll booth looking at speeding cars, or watching a high-speed printer in a print shop spit out thousands of pages.

It’s not the machines, it seems to us, but the predictable milestones that make time fly – 12:30 lunch, 3:00 coffee, 5:00 home commute, weekend shopping, afternoon football game , Upcoming school holiday, Annual trip to see family. In the old days life felt slow because there was always a wait – for rain to save the crop, for wars to stop, for the womb to conceive, for the pests to go away.

Waiting often comes with an element of opportunity, for better or for worse. The call may come, the letter may come late, the storm may arrive on time and the exam may be cancelled. Perhaps the report will finally be good news. Until we know, our hearts will start beating a little faster, our breathing will be a little shallower, and our minds will drift from one thought to the next inexplicably, while never going far enough from that one overwhelming worry. Waiting is sweating.

It was, above all, a year of waiting for results that came unexpectedly and left us worrying: someone we had lunch with, who we knew to be extra careful, unexpectedly received a positive diagnosis. ended with We were contact cases—one of those dreaded new phrases that have invaded our lives, along with PCR tests and viral loads, mRNA vaccines and KN95 masks. Therefore, we had to test several times. We had to wait for the results many times. Sometimes the news was good, sometimes bad, and sometimes we didn’t know what to think. Was it better to receive a negative test, or to learn that you had already contracted the virus and never noticed?

We would have done anything to get some results slowly. In India’s second Covid-19 wave, the numbers soared to breathtaking heights in a matter of days, leaving the healthcare system vulnerable. Millions of families were waiting for hospital beds and oxygen tanks for their loved ones; And then, often, they waited at the cremation line or some place in the cemetery.

The other wait has been going on for years. We, like many people around the world, looked forward to another US presidential election from the day Donald Trump took office. The wait extended until this year, until the election of Joe Biden was finally ratified by Congress. Waiting for election results, coupled with minute-by-minute media coverage, has gotten more crazy than it seems. Will Wisconsin change? Will Georgia turn around? Who will control the Senate? What is it taking so long in North Carolina?

And the wait did not end there. The race for control of the US Senate didn’t have to come down to a county in Georgia and less than 1% of the vote, but it did. The certification eventually counted in the Senate, but Trump and his supporters did not seek to block it by staging a rebellion in the US Capitol.

The arc of COVID-19 has in some ways depicted the presidency of a man who refused to take the disease seriously. There was a jolt when it arrived, a lull when it looked like it would be okay, and then a slow turn for the worse. Also, new results emerged of obsessive about ultra-vital signs, oxygen levels, fever. Results come daily—one more thing to wait, without knowing what the result means or how to react. Was it good news because the patient’s condition did not worsen, or was it bad news because it did not improve?

The same ambition involved the delivery of the daily infection counts we see on our phones every evening, courtesy of the French government’s TousAntiCovid app (we spent the last academic year in France). Is 20,000 high or low? Too much for comfort, certainly, but apparently too little for the government to do about it.

Other results came unexpectedly fast. The vaccine trial came as a pleasant surprise. Mastering the difference between efficacy and effectiveness almost leads to results. The news was good. Many vaccines worked better than expected. And yet, with the virus acquiring new mutations that could reduce the effectiveness of current vaccines, there are always more consequences to wait and finish the puzzle.

COVID-19 vaccines offer a new source of hope and a new reason to wait. Much of the world is still wondering when and whether adequate vaccines will be available to their citizens, while “world leaders” struggle to support their declarations about the need for universal vaccination with real doses.

But for those lucky enough to have been vaccinated, there’s a new question that won’t be answered refreshingly. When we look back at the scars left by the pandemic, what do we see—just the pain of isolation, or even the joy of everyday human interaction? Perhaps it is time to start building on those still-lived memories toward a new solidarity that is universal without the abstract, built on the apparent joy of being together, but stretching to the ends of the world. Maybe it can help us deal with the biggest worry of our time.

Those results are in, too: The planet was literally igniting last summer, and cyclone season had begun early. The Earth is warming and will continue to warm, making life impossible in some of the densest human settlements today. Now it waits to see if there is a collective will to face these consequences, to stand up and “just say no”, to accept that there is no more time for excuses, and that our leaders should speak up. Must do more than do. ©2021/Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org)

Abhijit Banerjee and Cheyenne Olivier are, respectively, Nobel Prize winners in Economics and Professor of Economics at MIT; and an artist.