06/12/2020
What epidemiologists said about life after the vaccine:
🩺 "..I can’t imagine being in a crowd or attending any crowded events until 80% or more are vaccinated.”
- Julie Bettinger, associate professor, University of British Columbia
🩺 “The new normal will be continued masking for the next 12 to 18 months and possibly the next few years. This is a paradigm shift.”
- Roberta Bruhn, co-director, Vitalant Research Institute
🩺 “I think widespread availability of vaccines will result in the further relaxation of most precautions by mid-to-late summer 2021.”
- Michael Webster-Clark, postdoctoral researcher, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
🩺 “It’s hard for me to imagine that it will ever go back to our previous ‘normal,’ but I do think that new preventive measures that we’ve had to adopt, like masks, will feel normal in time. In that sense, I’m optimistic that life will settle into a new kind of normal.”
- Marilyn Tseng, assistant professor, Cal Poly
☘ Generally in line with our expectations in the New Year. We should be in a better place come 2H2021. However, it is unlikely we will return to pre-pandemic levels (if at all) for at least until well into 2022.
Meanwhile, we would have retained much of the pandemic precautions and lifestyles for the next couple of years. Many will continue to WFH. Many will have re-designed their lives and businesses around pandemic driven road blocks.
In housing, we still feel that people will continue to seek places closer to nature and not have to think about how fast they can get to work as a top priority. The need to be closer to parents/grown children or even bringing them to live together may support volume.
The government will continue to be cautious on the supply side. Demand side is supported by real needs, a high savings rate and low interest rates locally, and the appeal as a safe haven/strong currency/efficient public services to foreigners wishing to set up home &/or offices here.
Even though the 15 bids for Tanah Merah site was quite strong, we still expect prices to be subdued. The strong local demand is offset by the tapering in the PR population since 2010 and the slowing growth rate of foreigners in the population since 2016.
The one uncertainty is we still need much of the world (we depend on) to have the virus under control. We can not even think about getting back to a better tomorrow without that happening. The vaccine alone will not solve the problem because the logistics of how to get enough people vaccinated to reach herd immunity is an unknown.
There are other financial concerns at the government level with money supply and balance sheets.
But still, we are hopeful that the vaccine in the local population will be successful and then we will have a better view of how things will pan out thereafter.
Stay strong! 🤟
☘ Have a Wonderful Week Ahead! ☘
They are going to the grocery store again, but don’t see vaccines making life normal right away.
