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Life after COVID-19
neXus:
COVID-19 is not going to go away but at some point it will be like the Flu. People will die from it each year but we will have vaccines in place, younger generations will naturally be more immune and the world will go to some form of normality.
But what will that normality be? What things do you guys think will stay the same and what will change permanently?
Binary Shadow:
personally I hope WFH is proven and remains more common, reducing travel will help co2 emissions
Clock'd 0Ne:
100% as above on WFH. It needs to be recognised as a normality and not an exception, thankfully tech is forward thinking on this and so its starting to get a lot of traction. My position was advertised as 100% remote (the odd trip to the office was accepted for big events, meeting the team and being inducted, etc) but we have a new starter joining next month who will not even get to meet anyone in the office and will need their Macbook posting out to them; I'll be inducting them remotely. Strange new world.
Not sure of the likelihood of this being a recurring event like the more common strains of flu, so far this has been categorised as more like SARS/MERS which are infrequent. I hope so anyway.
Hopefully with the sheer volume of ongoing parallel research now happening, this will become a time when we work out ingenious ways of putting some of these viruses to bed properly without the same level of effort needed each time (the same way they are starting to figure out how treatments that can attack any cancers). On that note: https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-vaccine
Right now though, I can only see the culture of fear and surveillance getting stronger, while the economy continues to tank. Pay off your mortgages ASAP folks.
Serious:
The speed of spread of covid-19 certainly shows up the vulnerabilities of our society over the last 50 years. Fast and cheap air travel has proven to be a vulnerability and the UK amongst others have shown that a lazy government can make the issue far worse by not closing the borders and checking all travelers.
The lack of a decisive lockdown in the UK points towards the lack of control of the government, or the dislike of government control, and this is also the case in the USA where known covid-19 deaths are almost at the level of Spain. The fact that this coincides with the B***** issue is very bad news for UK companies. Neither issue is going to go away quickly.
How long it will be in the background is still unknown, it might just vanish again in a few months or it might become a constant issue. What is obvious is that the governments need to be more aware of the issues and ready to act much quicker than they have done. That might mean rethinking the idea of travel for business and holidaying. Fictional writing, TV and films have all had instances of a severe pandemic being carried around the world killing billions. I would hope that the governments accept the message of this lesser pandemic, but then the governments have always tended to be slow at learning lessons from history.
China locked down very quickly which restricted their recorded deaths although the number may be massaged by the government. South Korea instigated a policy of mass testing which seems to have worked well enough.
Serious:
--- Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on April 07, 2020, 08:14:13 AM ---... so far this has been categorised as more like SARS/MERS which are infrequent. I hope so anyway...
--- End quote ---
SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) are both coronaviruses and related to covid19. SARS effectively vanished after being isolated and few cases of MERS have been reported recently. The latter is endemic in Egyptian tomb bats so it will pop up every so often. Both seem to be more dangerous to the individual but less likely to spread person to person.
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