A new world is emerging in the places crushing Covid, and it is not always what you might expect
At the start of this month, an Israeli chief executive named Udi Ben Shimol logged on to a video call with bosses from cities across Europe who all wanted to ask him one thing: What’s it like when life starts returning to normal? In other words, what is it like in the country that has become the world’s Covid-19 vaccine superstar? “They said, ‘Udi, you are in Israel, you’re at the end of the tunnel. What do you see?’” he told me last week.
Alas, he had bad news. “I said to them, ‘I see another tunnel’.” I suspect the European executives were as disappointed as I was. More than half Israel’s population has had at least one vaccine shot and more than a third has had two. It has already started to reopen after a year of the lockdowns still dogging parts of Europe. Yet Ben Shimol is just one of a number of people I have spoken to recently who bear sobering tidings from the leading edges of the pandemic.
Their impressions are just snapshots, but they suggest a need to be ready for anything, because even a successful vaccine rollout can have side-effects.
Read the article by Pilita Clark in the Financial Review.