2020 in review: what a wild ride it has been

Does anyone even remember what happened in January through March?

Today's expression: Arms race
Explore more: Lesson #324
December 28, 2020:

It’s hard to believe that we started the year with Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex stepping back from their royal duties and mourning Kobe Bryant. January through March of 2020 – pre-COVID lockdowns for most of the world – feel like they happened many years ago. This episode looks back on the wild ride we’ve been on in 2020. Plus, learn what an “arms race” is.

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What a wild ride: today we take a look back at 2020

Lesson summary

Hi there again, it’s Jeff, and this is Plain English lesson number 324. JR is the producer and the full lesson is available at PlainEnglish.com/324.

Coming up today: I bet you forgot a lot of what happened in 2020. I sure did. Locusts, wildfires, Harry and Meghan, Brexit, the Diamond Princess, Parasite. It all happened in 2020, and we’ll take a nostalgic spin through this crazy year. The expression is “arms race.” This is a long lesson, so let’s dive right in.

A look back at 2020

The year began innocently enough with news from London: Prince Harry and his wife the Duchess of Sussex would be “stepping back” from their royal duties to pursue a private life in North America.

Britain officially left the European Union on January 31, 2020, three and a half years after its dramatic vote in 2016. The split was real, but not as disruptive as many had feared. The two sides left the hardest negotiating to later; in fact, the EU and Britain spent much of the year trying to negotiate an agreement that governs their trading relationship going forward. Their current agreement ends on December 31.

In other political news, Donald Trump had been impeached at the end of 2019 and was promptly acquitted by a friendly Senate in January.

A mysterious disease started spreading in China, causing some fears that it might spread to other countries. International travelers arriving in Europe and the US started wearing face masks as a precautionary measure, but most countries dismissed the possibility that it might turn serious.

Australia began the year battling some of the worst wildfires in its history. By the time they were over in March, over 18 million hectares had burned, destroying almost 3,000 homes and causing billions of dollars in damage. Three billion animals were injured or killed and several species may have been driven to extinction.

Tragedy struck in a much more personal way in California. Basketball star Kobe Bryant died in a plane crash in Los Angeles. His 13-year-old daughter was aboard the plane; they had been going to one of her basketball practices.

The Diamond Princess cruise ship anchored offshore in Japan after an outbreak on board: almost the entire ship had the new disease and nobody knew what to do with the sick passengers. China had imposed drastic restrictions on the city of Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the disease.

Still, life continued as normal in most of the world in February. The Kansas City Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV in Miami. Parasite won Best Picture, the first non-English language movie to do so.

Then, all hell broke loose in March. An outbreak in northern Italy overwhelmed hospitals. Nobody knew how to treat this disease and the death rate was alarmingly high; it was spreading quickly and severely affecting the region’s senior citizens. The Italian government took the unprecedented step of ordering citizens to stay at home unless they had specific permission to leave. Paralyzed, other governments around the world lost the opportunity to get out in front of the problem. Spain, France, and other countries in western Europe followed in Italy’s footsteps, their health systems overwhelmed by this new disease. The US was hit first in Boston, then in New York and San Francisco, and quickly in other populated areas. Lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and business closures followed, but seemed temporary.

By April, it was clear that the lockdowns would be a “new normal” until a vaccine could be found. Sports, music venues, restaurants, bars, night clubs, cinemas all closed. Then, in a domino effect, came daily necessities like hair salons, gyms, and shops. Only “essential” businesses stayed open. Europe and North America settled into business closures and restrictions for the long run. Latin America followed.

And so began a forced experiment in long-term remote work and remote education. Many professionals found this to be easier than they thought it would be. But many service-sector workers were furloughed or lost their jobs during the lockdowns and still haven’t returned to full time work.

In the developing world, lockdowns hit especially hard, as many workers were forced to stay home and didn’t have the resources to provide for their families. In India, millions of city laborers without any chance to make a wage embarked on a massive reverse migration to their home villages, often traveling on foot for hundreds of miles.

Global stock markets plummeted in March amid the uncertainty surrounding the virus and the response, but it was a short crisis: markets in China and America both staged dramatic comebacks and set record highs before the year was over.

In May, with nerves already frayed from the pandemic, an American police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed a black man on the street by kneeling on his neck for more than eight minutes, an appalling instance of unjustified police brutality. Demonstrations erupted first in the United States and then around the world as protesters demanded reforms to policing and an end to racial discrimination.

Several world leaders fell ill with COVID-19: Boris Johnson was hospitalized and put in intensive care; Donald Trump was hospitalized in the midst of his re-election campaign; Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro was also infected, as were leaders of Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau narrowly escaped: he self-quarantined after his wife caught COVID, but he never got it. In a scary moment, a health minister in Iran started showing symptoms of COVID-19 during a live television briefing about COVID-19. Royalty was not spared. Britain’s Prince Charles and Prince Albert II of Monaco were infected. Tom Hanks, the closest thing we have to royalty in the United States, was one of the early victims, too.

The world’s governments started a cycle of loosening, tightening, then loosening restrictions. Over the summer, it seemed that COVID was dying down, that we could manage it with mask-wearing and social distancing. But the virus came back in force in the fall, and many restrictions returned. France, Ireland, and the UK went into another strict lockdown; in London, they discovered a new strain of the virus that spreads 70 percent faster than previous strains. New York closed indoor dining again in December. Even sunny Los Angeles banned outdoor dining as well as the year came to a close.

It was not a good year for democracy and personal liberty. China imposed a strict new law on Hong Kong, clamping down on speech and expression, all in the name of “national security.” Belarus and Venezuela cemented their slide into total dictatorship with sham elections.

Poland, New Zealand, and the United States held legitimate national elections. Even Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern seemed surprised at the magnitude of her own victory in New Zealand; it was the best showing for a major party there since 1951. American Democrats’ prayers were answered when Joe Biden toppled Donald Trump in November, though the final vote was closer than they had hoped it would be. Chile overwhelmingly voted to form a Constitutional Convention to draft a new constitution. Lebanon’s entire cabinet resigned after a massive explosion in the port of Beirut that was caused, in part, by government negligence. Lebanon’s Parliament is still trying to form a replacement government; the president of France, now himself sick with COVID, is mediating.

Giant hornets from Japan crossed the Pacific Ocean and attacked people on the west coast of America. A swarm of locusts chewed through much of east Africa’s food supply. It was the worst locust infestation in 70 years in Kenya.

After a year of bad news, hope emerged in November: not only had two global pharmaceutical companies developed vaccines against the coronavirus, but the vaccines were shown to be 90 percent effective in preventing the disease—a much better result than had been anticipated. Several other vaccines in late-stage trials were also promising. Ninety-year-old Margaret Keenan of Coventry, England, was the first person to receive the newly-approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Several new words entered our vocabulary, at least in English. “Social distancing” must be the phrase of the year. PPE, or personal protective equipment, was a buzzword. Lockdown, once used only in emergency situations, described our everyday existence. Super-spreader, asymptomatic, droplets, incubation, flatten the curve, shelter in place, N95: the terminology of epidemics became the vocabulary of the masses in 2020.

It was the year we learned to appreciate health care workers, supermarket employees, and deliverymen. Italy set the example for the world at the beginning of the pandemic, saluting the health care workers and keeping spirits up by singing on their balconies during the darkest moments of the early outbreak.

For the world’s middle class, 2020 was the year life slowed down. With global travel frozen and offices shut, people adapted to life indoors, video calls, take out instead of indoor dining, wearing a mask in public, and working and studying from home. Global sports leagues restarted toward the end of the year, mostly without fans or with limited capacities.

The pandemic struck just when new streaming platforms were in an arms race for content, providing the world a comfortable cushion of new television shows and movies for the lockdown. Traditional cinema wasn’t so lucky: most movie theaters remain closed and blockbuster releases scheduled for 2020 either went straight to streaming or were postponed.

Netflix said viewing time of documentaries and reality TV had doubled this year over prior years and non-English content was up 50 percent. The most popular reality shows were Tiger King, Love is Blind, and Selling Sunset. In international content, The Platform from Spain; House of Flowers from Mexico; Barbarians from Germany; The Crown from the UK; and Rogue City from France were also popular. Korean dramas started to gain popularity, too, after Netflix signed up several of them. Home cooking shows were popular and sourdough bread baking became a worldwide family tradition.

An action-packed year

More than your money’s worth today—there was no way I could summarize 2020 in the length of just a single average lesson. Can you believe we were talking about Harry and Meghan a year ago? It seems like a minimum of three years of global events in just twelve calendar months.

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Expression: Arms race