Americans would have to go back several decades at least to find a year as hellacious as 2020.

Perhaps not since 1968, when the United States was fighting a war in Vietnam, when police were clashing with young people protesting that war, and when Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, has there been so much turmoil in America.

Between the pandemic, economic collapse, racial unrest, and possibly the largest political bifurcation the country has ever seen, it’s been hard for folks to catch their breath. But as the philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

What? Repeat 2020? God forbid.

And yet, while people the world over have been counting the days until this miserable year is over, are there tangible reasons to expect 2021 will be much better?

And are there lessons to be learned that will prevent us having from having to live through another year like this one?

If conversations with medical, economic, political experts and community leaders are any indication, the answer is a conditional yes.

The pandemic

Despite all of the events creating screaming headlines the past year, it’s an unavoidable conclusion 2020 will be remembered as the year of the pandemic. The covid-19 outbreak has had an all-encompassing impact on society. As the pandemic unfolded in the United States, plenty of mistakes were made, according to Pittsburgh-based infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh Adalja.

Adalja, a critical care, infectious disease and emergency medicine physician, has been treating patients at his hometown Butler Memorial Hospital and several other Western Pennsylvania hospitals.

“When it comes to the government response to the pandemic, I really think that the government did nothing well, with maybe the possible exception of Operation Warp Speed, the development of vaccines,” said Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Adalja believes the government response has been flawed going back to January, “when there was an evasion of what this virus really meant and then as we moved into February and March, a very flawed testing system that relied on a CDC test that was ineffective.”

Testing criteria caused many cases to be missed, according to Adalja, because it was focused on people traveling from China with only lower respiratory tract symptoms, meaning that mild cases weren’t going to be tested.

“It led to a situation where you had cases pouring into the United States from Europe seeding chains of transmission that spilled over into hospitals in places like New York and left governors with blunt tools because they were unable to identify who was infected and who wasn’t,” Adalja said.

“All of those cascading shutdowns that you saw in the spring were the result of basic ineptitude when it came to testing. The same thing happened again in the summer and again in the winter. We’ve seen the same pattern and the same mistakes being made over and over again.”

Having Americans downplay the seriousness of the virus has been a source of frustration for Adalja throughout the year.

“I just worked the last three days taking care of covid-19 patients, and this isn’t something that anybody that has any kind of respect for reality can downplay,” he said.

Adalja said he’s been disappointed with the level of scientific discourse in this country.

“When science is denigrated in this way, when facts and reason and rationality go out the window, and lies become the norm, that speaks to real societal rot that we have to deal with. It’s something we’re going to pay for in years to come.”

Although he remains disappointed with the way testing is going in the United States, saying the U.S. still cannot test the way South Korea and Taiwan could in February and March of 2020, Adalja believes things will improve.

“The documents that I’ve seen from the Biden transition team do give me confidence because they reflect many of the programs and actions that all of us in the field have been advocating for since January of 2020 — home testing, increasing availability of testing, quicker testing turnaround, opening schools, better support for vaccine delivery and just the general impression that the Biden administration is really going to enshrine science as the guiding principle,” Adalja said.

Economic collapse

With the rise of covid-19 cases came an economic downturn unlike any seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Companies big and small, suddenly unable to do business as usual, struggled to survive. There were closures and layoffs, unemployment numbers spiked and those who suddenly found themselves without an income worried about keeping a roof over their head and food on the table.

Hardest hit were restaurants, bars and entertainment venues. After being closed for months or limited to take-out orders only, restaurants were able to open again at limited capacity. But then in the middle of the busy holiday season, Gov. Tom Wolf closed indoor dining at restaurants again until Jan. 4.

As Congress continued to debate a second stimulus package to ease the burden on businesses and the unemployed, Risa Kumazawa, a Duquesne University associate professor of economics, said she was skeptical.

“It’s not going to be enough. I don’t know what $600 is going to do, especially since this is a one-time thing,” said Kumazawa. “I don’t see people being optimistic enough to start spending.”

In the long run, Kumazawa believes “you can’t fix the economy if you don’t fix the pandemic first” and the expected spike in positive covid-19 tests caused by holiday travel is going to make for a rough first and possibly second quarter of 2021.

“You hear health officials talk about the dark days to come, and I really can’t separate the health issue from the economic issue. The projection for 2021 is going to rely very heavily on when everybody is going to get vaccinated,” Kumazawa said. “I just don’t see the economy suddenly recovering when vaccinations have only just begun.”

But Kumazawa’s forecast for 2021 is not all gloom and doom. She said she sees the economy starting to recover in the second half of 2021. A full recovery may take longer.

“With the Great Depression, recovery took about a decade,” Kumazawa said. “Considering that this coronavirus has hit not just manufacturing or the housing market, it’s hit every industry, I suspect that this is going to take a long time as well for us to recover from.”

Racial unrest

As if the pandemic and ensuing economic collapse weren’t enough of an indication that 2020 would go down as a year like no other, the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in late May brought a wave of protests that would make an indelible mark on Pittsburgh and the nation.

Demonstrators made it clear that racism and police violence toward Black people in the United States was unacceptable.

On May 30, thousands of demonstrators descended on Downtown Pittsburgh for what began as peaceful protests with chants and moments of silence for Floyd. But violence ensued as two Pittsburgh police cars were destroyed after they were set on fire by protesters and more than 70 businesses were damaged and looted.

What the violence may have overshadowed was the way people of all backgrounds, particularly young people, came together to protest racial injustice. For Tim Stevens, chairman and CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, the protests were a revelation.

“One thing that was noticeable to me as an activist was that, locally and nationally, most of the protests were extremely integrated racially and in most cases, predominantly white and led by young people at a level much deeper than in the 60s and 70s,” said Stevens.

“With the death of George Floyd we had an energy across the country that we hadn’t seen in decades or maybe never at the level it was. I think what happened was that death was so graphic, horrific, startling, that a lot of white people said for the first time, ‘that’s what Black people are talking about.’” Stevens said. “It just reinforced to a lot of white Pittsburgh that there is a discrepancy in how Black people are treated by law enforcement.”

Stevens called 2020 a pivotal year for Black people in Pittsburgh. On Monday he released correspondence between his organization and city officials, including Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, that detail commitments the city has made to police reform. They include making the police department more diverse and addressing bias in the department.

“There is actual hope and progress on the horizon,” Stevens said.

The Election

Have we ever had a political year quite like 2020?

Given the continuing debate about mail-in balloting and questions about the legitimacy of elections, the past year certainly stands out, according to Terry Madonna, senior fellow for political affairs at Millersville University.

“If you go through American history we’ve had a Civil War, depressions, all sorts of complex, deeply rooted political problems so it’s not easy to say this is the most unique election in American history. But certainly it’s on a path of its own,” said Madonna.

After losing the general election to President-elect Joe Biden, President Trump has continued to claim there was widespread election fraud even though he has provided no proof and his own Attorney General, William Barr, determined Trump’s claims were baseless.

Biden will be sworn in Jan. 20 and will thus inherit a host of problems with the pandemic and the economy topping the list. Will Biden receive cooperation from Republicans in Congress, some of whom seem unwilling to put the contentious election in the rear-view mirror?

“It’s not likely that they’ll put their problems behind them. There are many Republicans who aren’t going to accept the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency, just as there were Democrats who didn’t accept the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 victory,” said Madonna.

“Biden has gone out of his way to use the word ‘unity,’ and I suspect he’s going to reach out to Republicans in the Senate, especially if Republicans win one of the two (Georgia) Senatorial elections on Jan. 5,” Madonna said. “That’s the nature of his personality and the direction he would like to take the country.”

But Madonna does not sound particularly optimistic about Biden’s chances of mending fences.

“We are more deeply divided, as Americans, on a whole array of important issues than at any time since we’ve had scientific polling,” said Madonna.

In order to be successful, Biden must take a common sense approach to his presidency, said University of Pittsburgh professor Jerry Shuster, who teaches political communication and presidential rhetoric.

“If Biden goes in there thinking he’s going to change the minds of people who are solid Trump supporters, he’s going to get nothing done,” Shuster said. “He’s going to have to work with the House and Senate members who can go either way, and Biden has the people skills to be able to do that.”

Shuster said he believes Biden understands the art of compromise which he feels has been missing in Washington.

“He’s not going to be the panacea to all of our problems, but one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that Biden is going to bring dignity and respect back to the White House. Our enemies as well as our friends need to be able to respect us again, and that’s one goal I think Biden will achieve.”

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