2022 will be about resilience

Whenever a new year begins, it does so with a certain amount of uncertainty, nobody has a crystal ball to warn of the dangers to come, because fundamentally the most negative things are what always worry people because they essentially want to take precautions. 

All decision-making also requires moving on the most accurate terrain possible, trying to take the least risk possible, but this is not always possible, and this pandemic has made the panorama more complicated.

The year 2020 was a year that practically went blank, that calendar was filled with crossings out of everything we could not do, neither personally nor professionally.  There were simply a multitude of cancelled events from graduations, weddings, christenings, first communions and even many funerals could not be celebrated in the usual way.

Last year, with the advance of the anti-COVID vaccinations, especially in the run-up to the summer, people resumed their postponed events with less capacity and with many restrictions. But it is true that there was a certain feeling of a return to normality.

However, not only Delta but the presence of Omicron crashed us back into our current reality: we are still dependent on the progress of the pandemic as full of contradictions as from the very beginning when it was declared as such by the WHO: 14 March 2020.

What will 2022 look like?  The answer is simple because it means that we will continue to orbit around the coronavirus, keeping a close eye on its spread, its degree of lethality, its contagiousness in the face of existing vaccines. 

To that extent, our decision-making will be closely linked to the decisions taken at the governmental level to curb infection and reinfection.
I would not yet venture to make a travel plan abroad for nine months from now, there are plans that we used to make with that temporality, but that at the moment it is better to move to the short term and decide rather with days close to the availability to travel. 

There are sectors that will be tied to this evolution, as we have seen in recent months: nightlife, hotels and tourism.

So far, Madrid is still holding the International Tourism Fair (FITUR) from 19 to 23 January and is doing so despite the fact that Spain is having more than 2,295 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. 
On the other hand, Germany has cancelled the ITB tourism fair for the third consecutive year and it is a very relevant fair for the global sector; it will only maintain an online format, which is not the same thing. 

Resilience is and will remain the word. This pandemic is forcing us to know ourselves, to readapt, to reinvent ourselves and to live differently.

Uncertainty will continue, never more so than now, it is necessary to plan for the short term, but we must also see the opportunities and seize them... wherever one business closes or one sub-sector begins to be displaced by another, there is an opportunity. 

Investing money should be done wisely, these are times to save, to find the place where you want to live; the movements of recent months show that people are leaving the cities to seek refuge in smaller towns and there are many adventurers willing to repopulate the forgotten villages. The real estate sector, both first and second hand, is experiencing its own particular boom as a result of this mobility. 

Dear reader, my biggest piece of advice for this new year is to be prudent and cautious - like the little ant in the fable who, thanks to his foresight, used to get through the winters better - because that way you will be better protected. We still have time to win this biological war and we will need science, patience and resilience to emerge victorious. The most eagerly awaited news in 2022: second-generation vaccines capable of cutting off the transmission of the coronavirus and more effective and efficient in their protective duration. We must not let our guard down...