June 4, 2021 Last year, Covid-19 had barely engulfed the world when people began anticipating the recovery: preparing for it, imagining it, willing it into being. At the end of March 2020, for instance, António Guterres, the United Nation’s secretary general, called for a recovery that would lead to “a different economy.” It had been just three weeks since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a global pandemic and the US suspended flights from Europe, and just a week after India announced a lockdown. Around 36,000 people had died worldwide, no one knew for sure if second or third waves were in the offing, and there were no vaccines. Any sort of recovery, we know now, was a long way away.