Brown on Business

December 14-20, 2020

Time-bending year causing many Americans to postpone New Year’s party plans, resolutions

By Wesley Brown
wesley@dailydata.com

With less that 20 days before Father Time puts 2020 to bed, it seems like no one is eager yet to make New Year’s resolutions as the nation continues to rebound from the shock, mind-bending, and time-altering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Fidelity Investments’ 2021 New Year Financial Resolutions study, more than two-thirds of Americans experienced financial setbacks in 2020, often from the loss of a job or household income or another emergency expense. Even those lucky enough to maintain their income still may have had to tap savings to help others, as nearly one-in-five attribute their financial setback to providing “unexpected financial assistance to family members or friends.” 

Despite this, many Americans remain optimistic concerning their finances and are determined to make their money work harder in the New Year with 72% confident they will be in a better financial position in 2021, the study notes. Still, most people just want 2020 to get over as quickly as possible before all that hope is gone.

“Americans are clearly ready to leave 2020 behind and start 2021 off on the right foot, including when it comes to their finances,” said Stacey Watson, senior vice president with oversight for Life Event Planning at Fidelity Investments. “This year’s top financial resolutions are consistent with what we’ve seen in the past; however, what makes 2021 unique is how people will achieve them, given the financial pressures and major life events many continue to experience throughout the pandemic.”

The Fidelity study also provided additional proof that COVID-19 is taking a big bite out of most families’ finances, as nearly one-third (29%) of Americans indicate they are in a “worse” financial situation compared to last year, versus only 19% who said the same in 2019 about the year prior. When faced with financial setbacks in 2020, the most common solutions were to “cut back on other expenses” (45%), “use my emergency savings” (37%), or “take on debt using credit cards or personal loans” (23%). One-in-five “borrowed from friends or family,” with Gen-Z and Millennials most likely to either borrow from or move in with family members.

Looking ahead to the New Year, nearly four-in-ten (38%) say they will spend 2021 in “Survival Mode,” meaning they will focus on the day-to-day to try to get themselves and their families through the next year. This outlook is more common among older generations (42% and 43% of Gen-X and Boomers, vs. 25% of Gen-Z and 34% of Millennials) and women (42% vs. 34% of men).

Outside of personal finances, what is interesting about many of the emerging 2021 predictions and economic forecasts for 2021 is that most are dependent on the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine in late December. Once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorizes the vaccines from pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna in the coming days, the COVID-19 treatments will be distributed to any location in U.S. that each state approves as the provider.

Under Arkansas’ 50-page plan to roll out a COVID-19 vaccine in late December, there will only be a limited supply of the vaccine as state health officials prioritize populations that would receive the vaccine first in three phases. Under a Phase I-A scenario that envisions only about 25,000 COVID-19 doses, according to Gov. Asa Hutchinson, the first group to receive the vaccine would be health care personnel likely to be exposed to patients with COVID-19. That group would include Arkansas residents working in hospitals, home health care, primary care clinics, dialysis treatment centers, long-term care facilities, plasma and blood donation workers, public health nurses, school and university health clinics, and ADH local health units.

Under that scenario, the remaining Arkansas population may not be fully protected against the fast-spreading coronavirus until late 2021 as the Natural State has set multiple records in early December for daily confirmed cases, deaths and hospitalization.

Interestingly, 2021 is expected to be a boon for some sectors of the U.S. economy, including the cold freight transportation industry.  According to a new report by global tech market advisory firm, ABI Research, the global freight industry is gearing up for an initial 2021 goal of transporting an average of 271 million ultracold and cold vaccine doses per month, which averages out to about 9 million doses per day. 

Early modeling by the United Kingdom-based research giant shows that there will be at least 857 temperature-controlled trucks leaving Pfizer and Moderna manufacturing facilities or distribution centers each month. Should AstraZeneca also receive approval, these numbers will be materially increased. ABI analyst Susan Beardslee added that distribution and delivery will continue to grow and get more complicated after the large urban and suburban areas are covered.

“Early vaccine candidates require ultra-low temperatures, as much as -70 degrees Celsius, or -94 Fahrenheit. This is impacted by a lack of adequate storage capacity for these new types of Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines,” explained ABI’s principal supply chain analyst, based in ABI’s Oyster Bay, N.Y. “The containers to store and transport them are not widely available and not required for common vaccines. Constant temperature control is needed from the manufacturing site to the inoculation sites. According to known criteria, people will require two vaccines from the same manufacturer within 21-28 days. That equates to at least 662 million doses in the United States and approximately 1.5 billion across the European Union.” 

Beardslee also noted that much of the focus, to date, has been on fulfilment centers and modal capacity for air. Another concern is the need to seamlessly track temperatures and provide alerts for any out-of-spec loads. This involves integrated software, sufficient compute and sensor capabilities throughout, and the cooperation of both public and private entities across multiple modes and likely competitors. 

“The scale of technology, strategy, and operations excellence needed will require transparency, flexibility, and scale never seen, and will take herculean efforts beyond the actual vaccine development and approval,” Beardslee points out.

Given those facts, there is a real possibility that getting the COVID-19 vaccine to more than 330 million people across the U.S., including more than 3 million in Arkansas, could still be going on this time next year – especially if there is not a smooth handout of the mammoth task between the President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden in January.

And that scenario has caused many folks to put their normal New Year’s party and resolution-making activities on the shelf. That said, putting 2020 in the rearview mirror for most Americans will be in many ways a reward of its own regardless of what the New Year might bring. 

Even if we must wait until 2022 to party like its 1999.