BUSINESS REFLECTION: After the Bell: A post-pandemic appraisal — in the final analysis, what did we learn?

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When you think back on the coronavirus pandemic, it seems hard to believe we went through such a thing. What was that? Remember the lockdowns and the family meetings, and packed hospitals and the lines at the vaccine centres, and the masks, always the ...

During the pandemic, we all suddenly discovered our inner Uber Eats. Before the crisis in the US, e-commerce sales constituted about 10% of total retail sales. This exploded during the pandemic and understandably jumped to about 17% of total sales by the end of 2020.

On the other hand, the work-from-home effect is lingering and remains pretty dramatic all across the world. Foot traffic in Manhattan is still 50% down, and traffic on the London Underground remains at 30% of pre-pandemic numbers. The consequences for the office rental market are obvious. The appropriate metric here is excess deaths; the deviation from the mean in the number of people who died. SA’s deviation from the mean was about 19% for the period January 2020 to January 2023. That was about the same as Brazil, much less than Colombia and Mexico, and about the same as the smaller countries of eastern Europe.

Perhaps SA’s dual half-private/half-government system is not nearly as terrible as the advocates of National Health Insurance claim. I know aspects of it are unfair, but the dual system has the advantage of creating a dynamic private sector and a respectable, if deficient, public sector. For SA to emerge from the pandemic with around 4 percentage points more excess deaths than the US while paying 20 times less for healthcare is pretty incredible.

 

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