November 16th 2020 - More COVID-19 Anxiety

Less than a week since the triumphant announcement of Pfizer vaccine brought euphoria to stock market and world's media, another news puts bright vision of brave new COVID-less world into serious doubt. British prime minister Boris Johnson announced that he was going to two weeks of self-isolation following the encounter with the MP later tested COVID-19 positive. In other words, he acted exactly like he acted seven months ago when he was exposed to the first time and like this his episode with hospitalisation and ICU never happened. So, Johnson and UK government act under the Worst Case Scenario of COVID-19 and assume that there isn't any long-lasting immunity from the disaease. That means that such long-lasting immunity won't be achieved even with "miracoulous" Pfizer vaccine because immunity, whether natural or artificial, is limited time and any attempt to stop the disease require obligatory comprehensive vaccinations of entire population every 6-10 months.

Such project would require solving enormous technical and logistical problems, and would have to go hand in hand with even more draconian comprehensive lockdowns with even more devastating political, social and long-term health consequences. Proponents of draconian lockdowns, which now have almost absolute support in most of the relevant governments, are further justifying their policies with scientific studies and research based on the Worst Case Scenario speculations about long-term effects of COVID-19 (heart damage, chronic fatigue and dementia) for those who actually survived their first encounter with the disease. All that, of course, still doesn't have any effect on the traditional stock markets which continue to behave like nothing had happened in 2020 and tend to ignore catastrophic unemployment and collapse of economic activity.

Bitcoin, at the same time, follows the same pattern or does its own thing, if you happen to like the idea of world's greatest cryptocurrency being decoupled from the stock market. Today it started slow but steady rise after the weekend when danced around 16000 US$ price. Now (11:25 UTC) it is around 16300 US$ and it looks like it could easily make another record for this year and reach highs not seen since the halcyon days of December 2017. If this happens, that might be very positive, at least for Bitcoin HODLers, because they need Bitcoin at the highest position possible when the inevitable 30 pct drop occurs.

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