IN AN IDEAL world, with life-changing, planet shaping technologies at our disposal, we should have shrugged off a global pandemic like water off a duck’s back. But it has not turned out so; rather, with on-again, off-again lockdowns, mask mandates and travel bans, our efforts have been as heroic as they have been ham-fisted, like turning bolts with a wrong-sized wrench: go too gently, there’s no traction; force it, the bolt is damaged and the masses take to the streets.
At its worst, in the first half of 2020, air passenger traffic fell by two-thirds, and global GDP which had tracked between 2.33 and 3.28 per cent in preceding years, flipped the other way to -3.60 per cent. Baselworld was finished when Rolex, Patek Philippe, etc walked out in April, at around the same time that Swiss watch exports fell 62 per cent in value compared to 2019. Thankfully, the rest of 2020 wasn’t so bad and the industry ended the year losing just a bit more than a fifth of its value.
Has the world in 2021 been,
