HOT AIR BALLOON FLIGHT

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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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December 8, 2021

How Will Covid-19 Evolve?

Even before Omicron raised global alarms, Covid-19's trajectory looked troubling. Now, attention has turned to Omicron and its potential dangers: As Devi Sridhar wrote recently for The Guardian, scientists will examine Omicron for three qualities—the severity of health outcomes it produces, its transmissibility, and its ability to evade the immunity provided by vaccines.
 
On the last point—immune evasion—the history of viruses is not so encouraging. Though it's been noted that some viruses tend to produce less-serious illnesses over time as they evolve, Ewen Callaway writes for Nature that some experts think future Covid-19 variants may not spread any faster, but evasion of existing immunity is a plausible long-term trajectory for the virus.
 
"That evolutionary path," Callaway writes, "towards immune evasion [but] away from gains in [transmissibility], is common among established respiratory viruses such as influenza says Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. 'The easiest way for the virus to cause new epidemics is to evade immunity over time. That's similar to what we see with the seasonal coronaviruses.'" Worldwide, four seasonal, common-cold-causing coronaviruses are endemic, Callaway writes, and they've evolved to evade immunity over the decades, indicating history is not on our side, when it comes to immunity and Covid-19.

Biden vs. Putin on Ukraine

US President Joe Biden has adopted "a tough new tone with Russia," The Economist writes after Biden's virtual meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, noting US promises of tough economic reprisals and a strengthened NATO presence in Eastern Europe, if Russia launches a major invasion of Ukraine. 
 
It's unclear if Biden's approach will work, the magazine writes, as is the confrontation's upshot. "If an invasion is averted, the next question will be what Mr Biden and Mr Putin might agree in any diplomatic deal," the magazine posits. "Although Mr Putin cares deeply about Ukraine, Mr Biden may prefer to get the matter off his plate."

Syria's Wartime Drug Economy

Ravaged by civil war, Syria has become a major exporter of an illicit amphetamine known as captagon, The New York Times' Ben Hubbard and Hwaida Saad report. With power and influence concentrated among loyalists to President Bashar al-Assad, Hubbard and Saad report that elite businessmen and the military have facilitated the manufacture and export amid Syria's rubble. Relevant companies, people, and representatives denied involvement, were unavailable for comment or declined to respond to the Times, but "[i]llicit speed is now the country's most valuable export, far surpassing its legal products, according to a database compiled by The Times of global captagon busts," Hubbard and Saad write.

Note to readers: The New York Times' Ben Hubbard will discuss Syria's drug exports with Fareed on this Sunday's GPS.

Erdoğan Gambles With the Lira

"It's never a good sign for a country's leader when fluctuations in the value of the national currency become a dominant concern for everyday people," Frida Ghitis writes for The World Politics Review. "That is the case today in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is taking a huge gamble with his monetary policy" by cutting interest rates in the hopes of spurring growth. 
 
That "has caused the local currency, the lira, to nosedive. Slashing the value of savings, spooking investors and further fueling inflation, the policy is already causing significant hardships for the Turkish people, who polls show have lost faith in the government's competence after several years of economic turmoil. The country may now be approaching a potential turning point in its politics, which have been dominated by Erdogan for nearly two decades." Erdoğan "is nowhere near defeated" in the far-off 2023 election, Ghitis writes, but current signs for the Turkish leader are troubling.