Obviously, the Governing Council spent a lot of time discussing the current status of the pandemic and its impact on our economy. Simply put, things really depend on how the pandemic evolves. We are basing our outlook on some particular assumptions about the virus. We assume authorities won’t need to reinstate the sort of extensive and widespread containment measures we saw in the spring.
But we can expect successive waves of the virus to require localized and targeted restrictions. The need for these restrictions will ebb and flow, and gradually diminish over time. We are assuming that vaccines and effective treatments will be widely available by the middle of 2022. Finally, we expect that the fallout from the pandemic will have some long-lasting effects on future economic growth.