Is omicron the end of the COVID-19 nightmare?
If you put it that way, I guess I would say yes. I think it's the end of the nightmare, because the people that have been living with the nightmare, primarily in the developed world, so many are going to be getting omicron and that's going to create a lot more natural immunity, plus most of those populations are already vaccinated. A lot of them are boosted and we've got all these therapeutics. I think that going forward, after omicron is done in relatively short order, this just feels like a very different virus for most of the countries that have been back and forth, back and forth with lockdowns. With the poorest countries in the world, very young populations, they've been living with the virus from day one. They don't have the vaccines in most. They've had to deal with it. In the case of China, that's the big question everyone knows I've been focusing on, but they're going to continue with these lockdowns, and so it hasn't been a nightmare per se, but it is going to be an economically very significant issue this year. But it's a little different than the way the question was phrased, so that's how I'll answer it.
Another coup is happening in West Africa. What's happening in Burkina Faso and in the region?
Yeah, it's the third coup in the region that we've seen in Mali and Guinea and now in Burkina Faso. It's this new organization that no one's heard of until yesterday that basically said it's military, the government in Burkina Faso was not doing a great job of maintaining stability and security in the country, and there've been growing attacks and influence of local Islamist extremists. That's a problem in all the countries that we've seen these military coups in recent months and, as a consequence, the Democratic elected government is no more. Former French colony, United States not doing an awful lot about it, China does most of the trade with them, but they're not engaged particularly either. So, as a consequence, it makes news and it moves on, and that's where we are.
Read Now
Show less