Happy New Year! We've got 3 charts for you today:
Last year we spent a lot of time tracking COVID-19 cases and deaths, so it's nice to start following something a little cheerier — the number of vaccination doses administered.
Israel leads the world
The latest data from Bloomberg reveals that the US has administered the most vaccine doses of any country, with more than 5 million jabs already... jabbed. However, when you adjust for population it's actually Israel which is, quite considerably, ahead of the pace.
Israel's vaccination drive began urgently on December 20th and has now successfully administered the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to more than 15% of its population in just 17 days. If Israel maintains that blistering pace (and they've actually been getting faster according to Our World In Data) they may be able to vaccinate the majority of their 9.1m adult population by the end of March.
It just so happens that Israel has an election coming up (also in March). For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presumably his election odds are likely to be closely entwined with his country maintaining the vaccination pace already set.
Pump those numbers up
In the US president-elect Joe Biden has outlined his ambitious goal for 100 million doses in his first 100 days in office. To hit that target, the US needs to administer almost 6 million doses a week, every week, until the end of April — meaning that the US needs to at least triple its current pace.
In the UK, which has just entered a third national lockdown, the story is similar. In London on Monday night PM Boris Johnson outlined a goal of roughly 14 million vaccinations by mid-February, a number which would cover the majority of people most at risk from COVID. To hit that target the UK would need to accelerate from its current pace of ~300,000 a week to roughly 2 million.
Delivering on the hype?
Another year, another set of delivery & production numbers from Tesla. The electric vehicle maker may have had a record year on the stock market — with its share price rising more than 570% — but what about its actual operational performance?
On Saturday Tesla reported that the company had delivered a little over 180,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter — leaving them just shy of half a million vehicles delivered for the year. That's a new high for Tesla, and it seems to have pleased investors, with the share price up another 4% this week.
As solid as those numbers are, it's still hard to marry them with the valuation being ascribed to Tesla at the moment. At its current share price Tesla is worth about the same as the next 8 automakers combined. Taking just one of those rivals — Volkswagen Group — as an example highlights just how much smaller Tesla still is in terms of cars sold. For the 11 months January-November, Volkswagen Group delivered 8.3 million vehicles, including 1.5 million Audis and 241k Porsches.
2020 was a very good year for Tesla's actual business, and an obscenely good year for its share price, but selling and delivering 180,000 cars will eventually need to be done in a month, or a week, for Tesla to live up to its great expectations.
This week more than 200 Google employees did something quite unusual for employees at a tech company — they formed a union. Officially called the Alphabet Workers Union, the goals of the group are similar to many traditional unions with one major exception — they aren't explicitly looking to better their pay. Instead, the group is focused on fighting for fair and inclusive working conditions as well as "the freedom to decline to work on projects that don’t align with our values".
Although 230 people might not be very many in an economy with millions of workers the AWU is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is that unions are pretty uncommon at technology companies where individual bargaining has long been the norm. The second is that unions in have been on the slide for decades across the US, and indeed the wider developed world, so it's curious that a new-economy company like Google (Alphabet) is seeing unions crop up.
A dying breed
In the 1950s, more than one-third of American workers were in a union, collectively bargaining for better pay and working conditions. Last year that number had fallen to just 10%. We won't call it a comeback, but if unions fighting for better pay don't make as much sense in a globalised economy, where low cost labour is readily available overseas, they may find better traction in fighting for values.
1) Gone forever. The WSJ estimates that up to 36% of all business travel may never return after the pandemic.
2) A rebrand is difficult for any organisation, but particularly for large government departments. The 73 year-old CIA gave it a go — launching a new website and logo.
3) The Earth is spinning faster than at any time in the last 50 years.
4) Amazon has acquired Wondery, the large independent podcast network, for a sum of ~$300m intensifying its competition with Spotify in the podcast space.
5) Since 2012, the number of available data science jobs has increased by 650%. The Master of Science in Decision Analysis from Minerva can help you land one of those jobs.**
6) Netflix has claimed that December broke its own records for total viewership. New series Bridgerton is partly to thank — reaching 63 million households in the first 4 weeks since its release.
7) More than 25,000 of you read our 2020: A Year In Charts piece from our final newsletter of last year. If you missed it, catch up here.
**This is a sponsored snack.
