Covid-19 After Effects

The day we will all finally be able to safely leave our homes will also be the day we will no longer need to. COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the process of making nearly every possible good or service available at our homes.

We now have available to us more home entertainment options, and of a higher quality, than ever before. Many of us have become aware of the many ways in which teaching and learning can take place at home. Content migration processes that were expected to take years, if not decades, have been condensed into a few months or weeks. Healthcare, too, is going through an accelerated process of digitization, and even the lumbering machinery of government has been forced into an accelerated process of digitization.

And so the question will increasingly become: If we will no longer need to leave our homes, what are the purposes for which we will want to leave our homes? The bar for opening the door and going outside is going to be set much higher. The idea of our home as a sort of base from which we emerge into the world every day will increasingly become obsolete. A new presumption will emerge whereby staying at home is the daily default. 

Pre-COVID-19 the ability to work from home on certain days was something to negotiate with the employer. In the post-COVID-19 world, the home will be the default workplace, and prospective employers will be required to negotiate your coming to “work”. 

K-12 schools will see the unbundling of their three major services: mass babysitting, socialization, and actual learning, as the line between school, extracurricular activities, and camp might blur.

And what will these developments mean for gender relations when more men work from home and children spend more time learning at home? Will it serve to further equalize the status of men and women, as both establish themselves equally in the home—or will our roles become stratified in new ways? 

The desire for human contact will remain unchanged, and so, one of the most valuable services we will all seek is curated, high-quality social encounters, which will extend from its current niches in luxury networking conferences to become the norm by which we make new friends and acquaintances.

The human need for nature will also remain as strong as ever, and questions about who controls nature, and our equality of access thereto, will become a larger part of our politics.

We are now observing an acceleration of the process of creating a new, more private indoor ecology. As investments, our homes will become even more important than they are today. We will invest more in the technological infrastructures of our homes, and in every aspect of comfort and productivity. 

With the pandemic still raging, it is natural that we long for the day when we can freely leave our homes. But in coming years, once that original sense of relief ebbs, we will increasingly ask ourselves why leaving was ever necessary.

Response to COVID-19How will COVID-19 change the world forever? 


Well, it is already probably the most documented global event in human history, touching billions of people around the world and causing trillions of dollars in economic damage. But the pandemic isn't over yet, and the largest consequences may be yet to come.
In the US it has gone through four phases: ignored at first in January/February 2020, then all-consuming from March to mid-May, then ignored again for a few weeks, and now in the news once again.
This is similar to the Gartner Hype Cycle, where technologies are first underhyped, then overhyped, then underhyped, and then eventually reach their potential.
Unfortunately, COVID is now likely to achieve its potential, at least in the West. After all, the virus was already at millions of cases worldwide. But the sheer scale of the crowds assembled in the last weeks of May — in all fifty US states and many Western countries — means the virus now has distribution. And unfortunately it doesn't care how righteous the cause behind these assemblies may be.
It is of course possible that there are deus ex machina( Latin: “god from the machine” a person or thing that appears or is introduced into a situation suddenly and unexpectedly and provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty.)
 that could save us from the worst outcomes. Populations might have higher cross-immunity, natural immunity, or acquired immunity than we think.

In cross-immunity, infections with other coronaviruses may confer some immunity. In natural immunity, inherited genetic variants may give some defense. And in acquired immunity, a larger proportion of the population may have been infected than we think.
But in each of these cases, we would be lucking out thanks to the mercy of Mother Nature. Because from a mere human perspective, from a public policy perspective, the social gatherings that have recently occured in the West have been in the opposite direction from what would typically contain a pandemic.


So the virus is now likely to infect the maximum number of people that it could infect in the West, or at least will end up near the upper bound of that possible range. In a sense this is very similar to what happened during the Spanish Flu. Passions over World War 1 were high, so marches occurred. While some who marched in those parades did wear masks, that wasn't enough to stop deadly second and third waves.
The reason I bring this up is that the impact of the virus was first underestimated, then estimated to be very impactful, then underestimated again, and may yet end up being very impactful after all -- even if this is not necessarily the current perception in the US, where even smart folks have remarked offhandedly that we are "post-COVID".
My point is that we aren't yet post-COVID, we are still in the middle of COVID, and until we have a vaccine, treatment, herd immunity, or some other means of effective containment we'll be in the middle for some time yet. Just as important as thinking about what it has changed, and will change, is what it is changing. More on the next.
So what are your opinions ? 
I would like to hear it from you.