Creative Connectivity

The Hearables Market – a Covid Update

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Dickens’ could have written that opening line to preface an account of the Covid year for the hearables industry. Over the last six months consumer demand for earbuds has risen to an unprecedented level. In contrast, hearing aid manufacturers have been dealt a body blow, with sales tumbling by up to 75%. As one industry executive put it “we’d have done better if we were an airline”. Covid has also had unexpected effects on the service industries which have been traditional drivers of hearables growth. Audio streaming services like Spotify have seen listening times go down, while video streaming and video conferencing have experienced unprecedented demand.

As countries came out of lockdown during the summer, we saw further shifts in usage, but it’s apparent that overall, hearables have done well out of the crisis. That trend looks set to continue as we face a second wave of the pandemic and further lockdowns.

Test and Trace – the Siege Mentality

England has finally rolled out its Test and Trace app, which we are all being exhorted to load on our smartphones. It’s good to see that the new app takes privacy seriously, using Google and Apple’s framework. But nobody seems to have worked through the implications of what the Test and Trace app can lead to, which is Lockdown by stealth.

Keep Quiet – Lockdown’s over

There haven’t been a lot of positives about the Covid lockdowns, but one of the few which has been widely reported is that we can hear birdsong again. As traffic volume has diminished and we work at home, the level of noise around us has fallen to a point that most of us can’t remember. It means that we can hear things we haven’t heard for many years. On the flip side, we’re missing the sound of social interaction. As restrictions are relaxed, it’s interesting to consider whether we have learnt anything from this period of unexpected quietness and how it might change our lives going forward.

Gambling with Testing and Tracing

We regularly read about fraud in sport, whether that’s cricket, football or horse racing, where a player accepts money to affect the result. There are arrests, trials and the culprits either banned or sent to jail. But what happens when a Government Minister takes a bet on a Government policy and then manipulates the data to win it?

It may sound bizarre, but that’s what has happened here in the UK, with Matt Hancock, our Secretary of State for Health. In an interview on LBC with Nick Ferrari, he was asked if he would take a £100 bet on reaching his target of accomplishing 100,000 coronavirus test each day by the end of April. Anyone with a scrap of morality would have answered “I don’t gamble on people’s health”, but not young Matty. Although not an ex-Etonian, like many of this cabinet colleagues, Matty always looks as if he wants to be seen as one of the posh boys who likes a flutter. After a brief hesitation, he accepted the bet on behalf of NHS charities. I’m sure that Nick Ferrari thought he was betting on a certainty, unaware that the result was about to get fixed.

Tom Lehrer Revisited – My Lockdown

Looking back on the past few months, everything I’ve written has been about the effects of Covid-19 and lockdown. It’s all still best described as a global experiment, where most of our politicians are still guessing.

It felt that it was probably time to lighten the tone. I grew up with the songs of the great American satirist, Tom Lehrer, which still feel as fresh as when they were written. Lockdown seemed to be a good opportunity to revisit and update them, so here’s my offering based on one of his classics – My Home Town.

What if there is no Covid-19 vaccine?

As most of the world starts to ease lockdown, it seems timely to ask the question of “What next?” Many will believe that the new normal is just a stepping stone back to the old normal, but the reality is that Covid-19 has not gone away. Nor are we likely to see a vaccine in the near future, for which read years. As epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse told New Scientist in early April: “I do not think waiting for a vaccine should be dignified with the word ‘strategy’. It’s not a strategy, it’s a hope.” Which raises the question of what the strategy is?

As long as the virus is around, it will continue to infect and kill. Unlike the Spanish Flu pandemic, it seems to be more discriminating, predominantly resulting in the death of those already at risk. It’s almost as if it’s sticking two fingers in the air to the last century of medical advancement, saying that for all of the machines we now have which go “ping”, the medical profession is as helpless as it was back in 1918.

What that means is that the elderly and those with underlying conditions will remain at risk and society will probably try to be over-zealous in protecting them. Without a vaccine, here in the UK, the implication is that we will probably never see the Queen make a public appearance. In the US, Donald Trump, assuming he doesn’t succumb to the virus, will still be promoting quack cures as he steps down at the end of his second term, and anyone with a parent in a care home may never get to hug or kiss them again, which is a strange definition of care.