This week, singer Adele announced in a tearful Instagram post the postponement of her Las Vegas residency one day before it was set to kick off. Last month, the singer's residency news set a box-off record with fans snapping up all of the roughly 100,000 tickets in about six hours. Adele claimed on her Instagram video that she was "gutted" with the cancellation but claimed Covid-19 has rendered it impossible to move forward.
Also, this week, my social media feed was flooded with images from Rio de Janeiro's packed beaches. Brazil, with 213 million people, is one of the worst affected globally by the pandemic, second only to the United States. With about 70% of the population fully vaccinated, the country is among the most vaccinated globally. Still, it has recently registered record daily Covid cases.
Adele fans were disappointed, but the singer emotional video apparently moved her social media followers, the majority being sympathetic to the artist's Covid delays struggles. Meanwhile, Brazilian beachgoers seem to have decided to keep living their lives despite the omicron rise.
It is hard to imagine that an event of such scale and anticipation as the world's biggest singer Vegas residency didn't have a contingency plan to deal with Covid, or more specifically, with the rapid omicron spread. When the residency was announced last December, the world was fully aware of the omicron wildfire spread. As a result, events have been canceled from Broadway shows and New Year's Celebration to major business even before the end of 2021.
As for Brazil, summer is expected to attract thousands of people to the beach. It's summer; it's Brazil, for God's sake! However, despite omicron's initial reports suggesting the variant is less severe and Brazil's high vaccination rate, Covid's third wave hit the health workers hard again. The country's health authority estimates that between 10% and 20% have taken sick leave since the last week of 2021. Only in Rio 5,500 professionals have left their jobs since December. So much for a mild symptoms variant!
From Adele's adoring fans to Rio's beachgoers, it seems everybody opted, let's say, to have a more optimistic approach in dealing with today's Covid reality. After all, we all want this to be over. Actually, we are cheering for it! We want Adele, we want to go to the beach. And let's not forget, we want NYC to come back too!
In fact, last December, The New York Times posted a very optimistic article about the long-awaited and most debated NYC comeback. The article "Omicron Surges in NYC During Its Comeback" by Ginia Bellafante, a fashion and art critic, lists a couple of signs that the city seems pungent again. According to her, despite the predictions made during the current crisis's early and most dire stages, more than 6,300 people have newly moved to the city since July of 2021. Reports show that in 2020, New York City lost fewer people to moves, per capita, than Washington or San Francisco. However, New York City's job losses were more significant than the national average. New York hasn't made up the lost ground as the American economy has recovered. Omicron made NYC’s path to recovery more challenging.
However, Adele's residency, Brazil’s summer, and NYC comeback have more in common than Covid. There's an uncomfortable truth staring us in the face in both cases.
All over the world, it seems that the uncomfortable truth is that we all want a version of the truth that suits our desire to have the world back to what it was. And we are willing to keep living as if nothing has changed. Which is in striking contrast to the world's sentiment in early 2020. Back then, a survey from the World Economic Forum found out that people yearned for significant change across the globe rather than a return to a "pre-Covid normal." According to the survey, nearly nine in ten wanted the world to change instead of returning to how it was.
What has happened since then? Maybe we just got too tired and let the inertia take over again. Or perhaps, the changes we wanted back then revealed to be too hard to tackle. But reality keeps checking in. Wave after wave; Covid keeps reminding that not only we can't just enjoy the moment as we did before, but we can't plan anything in the future the same way anymore too. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.
This leads to the tsunami. Last week I flew to LA to get a booster shot and enjoy two days at the beach. Unfortunately, on my second day there, a volcano eruption in Tonga triggered a tsunami alarm across the Pacific, prompting to close all beaches on the West Coast. A Tsunami alert in LA, seriously!? As if Covid itself isn't enough of a buzz kill. But looking back, it is a painful reminder that, hey, today anything is possible!
The reality is that as much as we try to have a "normal life," it looks like it's not going to stop. No matter how hard we try, we can't go back in time. Perhaps the absolute uncomfortable truth, like on Aimee Mann's 1996 song, it's that “it’s not going to stop until we wise up”.