So good news, bad news. Vaccines are now available to help usher this pandemic into the history books, but it will take many months to vaccinate enough people to fully return to our normal activities, which in some cases may have shifted more permanently.
Global central banks have been keeping interest rates phenomenally low and have been pouring stimulus money into their economies to help shore them up. But without the anxiously awaited herd immunity vaccination could provide later in 2021, even the most stringent public-health measures and restrictions to eliminate transmission of the coronavirus — now with a more transmissible strain identified in the United Kingdom circulating around the globe — “business as usual” is still at the mercy of this disease.
Even South Korea’s success at tamping down its initial surge of COVID-19 did not make the nation immune to subsequent surges in the third and fourth quarters of 2020, even amid tighter restrictions. At the