Every year, I like to make predictions as to how the year will go. At the end of the year, I like to grade myself. You see, unlike many of the media prognosticators out there, such as the folks in The McLaughlin Group, I believing in holding myself accountable for the success or failures of my predictions. So now it’s July 4th and we’re a little more than six months into 2021. Here’s what I predicted for 2021. Let’s see how I’m doing so far, shall we?
1) Warnock and Ossoff will win their Senate races in Georgia.
This prediction happened. In my (entirely unscientific) poll of what predictions readers thought would be misses, this one got the most votes — 17% — right after two variations of “all of these look correct.” It’s entirely reasonable to have thought that two progressives would have a hard time getting elected in Georgia. And yet, here we are. The Republicans, aided by the Supreme Court, are of course working very hard to make sure that this never happens again. Which means that Warnock has an uphill battle to keep his Senate seat in 2022.
2) Trump’s post-election grift will continue clean through 2021.
It’s too early to tell whether this will happen or not, but it’s been happening all through 2021 so far.
3) The City and State of New York will indict Trump on a host of white collar crimes.
So far this has not happened. Even though the Manhattan DA has indicted Trump’s organization and his organization’s CFO for what amounts to tax fraud, Trump himself remains unindicted. At this point I’m not confident that this will change by the end of 2021.
4) COVID-19 deaths (2020 and 2021 combined) will exceed 660,000 Americans by July 1, 2021
At the time I made this prediction, the CDC reported that about 330,000 Americans had died from COVID-19. My prediction was that this number would double in six months. By July 1st, we fell just short of that — 605,000 dead — according to the CDC. Believe it or not, this is cause for celebration. It means that we beat the behavior of an exponential curve, and we did it through a massive and mostly successful vaccination effort.
So my prediction didn’t happen, right?
Ah, not so fast. According to the University of Washington’s COVID-19 model, the CDC model is grossly undercounting COVID-19 deaths by about one-third. Once you factor those in (see the “Excess” tab), the number of deaths attributable to COVID-19 is over 900,000! So, I’m calling this prediction maybe happened and scoring myself a half point.
It also bears repeating that we’re not out of the woods yet. People like me who have had two shots of mRNA vaccine might be mostly immune to COVID-19, and folks in blue areas where the vaccination rate is over 70% might also benefit from herd immunity. But there are a lot of people who, for one reason or another, neither are vaccinated nor benefit from herd immunity. And these Americans are still in deep trouble.
Nor should we necessarily blame all of these folks for not getting their vaccine.
A lot of attention has gone to white nationalist or Christian nationalist Trumpies, and crunchy granola bohemian bourgeoisie knuckleheads like RFK Junior, who think the vaccine is a conspiracy to depopulate the planet, or believe similar nonsense. I have zero compassion for these folks; not out of malice, but because the last 18 months have been exhausting, and I need to conserve my bandwidth for people who aren’t being idiots.
But there are also huge swaths of African Americans who remember the Tuskegee Experiment and want to wait and see; mutatis mutandis for other groups of BIPOC Americans. There are also huge swaths of underclass workers who are hesitant because they know that the side effects will occasionally knock you out for a day or so, and they cannot risk missing a day of work. (IMO, this is one area where we screwed up on COVID policy — everyone should have gotten a day of guaranteed paid leave for the day after the vaccine dose, to get over side effects.) Last but not least, there are folks who can’t get the vaccine, because of allergies, autoimmune disorders, and other legitimate medical reasons. These are the folks whom herd immunity is supposed to protect.
There is a good chance that COVID-19, particularly the Delta variant, will rip through the unvaccinated population in undervaccinated areas, now that restrictions are being lifted. When it does, it will look a lot like COVID did in the months March 2020-January 2021: moving very slowly, and then hitting HARD with BIG numbers. Once that starts happening, expect for shutdowns to return and/or hospitals to be overwhelmed with patients to the point where they can no longer provide life-saving medical care for any patient, COVID or not. Your best bet is to keep your masks handy, stay in highly vaccinated areas if you can, and expect that shutdowns might come back sometime between now and July 1, 2022.
And for goodness sake, if you can get the vaccine, get it as soon as possible. Go to Vaccine.GOV, locate a vaccine provider, and get your shots ASAP. Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, it doesn’t matter. Go get one. You’re doing everybody a service, most of all yourself.
5) Democrats will win convincingly in Virginia, keeping the Governor’s seat and expanding their leads in both chambers of the legislature.
This one is too early to call. The election happens Tuesday November 2nd. Virginia’s Democratic legislature has expanded voting rights, and that’s likely to disfavor Republicans. As such, I’m optimistic about this prediction, despite somewhat tight polling in the Governor’s race.
6) There will be another war in Southeastern Europe
So far we have dodged this particular bullet. There are two hotspots from which a conflict could erupt. One is the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which saw a brief war last year and where there’s been a border crisis since this May. The other is Ukraine, where the ongoing war with Russia is currently at a standstill.
7) The US will see a spike (at least 10%) in sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies in late 2021.
I wrote this back on December 31st 2020, and it bears repeating:
The COVID-19 crisis, as brutal as it is, will taper off after mid-Summer as vaccines roll out to most Americans. Once this happens, people will be able to visit each other in person again without worrying about making each other sick. Millions of touch-starved and disaster-stricken Americans will want to bang, and it’s going to make the sexual explosion of 1967-1980 look like an episode of Leave It to Beaver.
It now appears that this is playing out exactly as I had predicted:
“We are expecting the summer of love,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “People are going to be connecting this summer as they come out of the pandemic and we think that is unfortunately going to drive STI rates even higher,” he said, referring to sexually transmitted infections.
Already many Americans are throwing away masks and preparing for a modern-day version of the Roaring '20s, complete with partying, drinking and, yes, lots of casual sex. — NBC News
The rest of what I wrote on Dec 31 also bears repeating:
Unfortunately not everyone is going to take the necessary precautions to prevent pregnancy and disease. This is in no small part because attempts to spread good information about safe and fun sex through social media are being actively stymied by social media companies, credit card companies, and increasingly, State and Federal government action. This is happening in the guise of preventing sex trafficking, and unfortunately, it is exactly the wrong action to take at the wrong time. State and local governments should take action now to prepare safe sex messaging and services for when COVID restrictions end.
8) The Peace and Neutrality for Taiwan ballot measure will go down in flames.
I’m calling this one a miss, because I (rather stupidly) didn’t realize that the P&N measure was for the 2019 ballot, not for the 2021 ballot. Cue sad trombone.