"Most of us probably haven't realized yet, and will soon, that things won't go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things will never be back" - Gordon Lichfield, Mit Technology Review
To stop the advance of the coronavirus we are radically changing our daily life: how we work, how we study, how we train, how we socialize, how we buy, how we take care of ourselves and our families.
To reduce the number of infected and dead, many governments are imposing Social Distancing, i.e., they are "forcing" people to stay at home as much as possible in order to decrease the likelihood of contact between a healthy person and an infected one. This is intended to prevent a sudden high number of sick people from saturating the health care system and causing it to collapse.
How long it will take and how drastic these measures must be, unfortunately, no one can say for sure. As far as restrictions are concerned, several countries have taken different approaches: In the US, President Trump has issued guidelines to control the virus which states that "assemblies must be limited to a maximum of 10 people"; while Italy is , more or less, following China's footsteps eliminating all unnecessary interactions and staying at home as much as possible. For now, this would seem to be the best approach because in China, finally, the situation seems to have stabilized.
The goal is the same: to keep the pandemic at a low level of infection until there are enough people who have had COVID-19 to be immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we do not know) or a vaccine is developed.
But it won't end there: as long as someone in the world has the virus, new cases can and will continue to occur without strict controls to contain them.
Social distancing has rapidly reached the upper ranks, widening the already considerable gaps between different internal parties and between different states (such as China and the United States).
The Sars-Cov-2 pandemic has unleashed the crisis in every sense and now it is political and geopolitical decisions that determine what will remain of the world at the end of it all.
So what will be left? What happens next?
History teaches us that the biggest crises always come out in a positive way: just think that after the First World War and the following Spanish flu there were the Roaring Twentis, the Jazz era, the French Riviera and the Berlin Babylon. This "Risorgimento" (let's call it that) was due to the fact that after all the deaths and privations suffered, people wanted to dance, meet and have fun and similar situations have happened countless times throughout history.
Almost a century later we find ourselves in the middle of another war. But this one is not fought with weapons, but with technology.
Before the virus, in fact, there were trade and technological clashes between the United States and China for world "supremacy". This new generation war, however, does not stop in times of pandemic because it can simply be fought from home with minimal interaction with the "enemy". It does not stop and becomes more ruthless with Donald Trump who defines Chinese the virus, to provoke Xi Jinping, and its Administration invites American companies to leave China.
But now that the U.S. is entering the early stages of the virus, China is slowly coming out of it, allowing it to focus on operations to gain more influence over other countries and to clean up its image of "Patient 0". Operations aimed at producing areas of influenza and making allies, but its distribution of masks, drones, and respirators to the rest of the world is helping to save lives and will certainly pay off in the long run.
In all this we find Europe which closes the borders and is also competing for masks, suits and respirators between EU countries.
The predictions therefore do not seem to be the best: the post-pandemic world would seem a place without a leading, divided and suspicious country. The victory of social distancing.
Given the current state of the pandemic, in the short term there will certainly be damage to businesses that rely on the aggregation of many people (restaurants, gyms, cinemas, public transport, etc.). But the world is already adapting with an explosion of new services in what has already been defined shut-in economy.
The term Shut-in economy refers to a "closed (at home) economy". It refers to everything that is on-demand, ordered from home, asked for and used online.
Nothing new then, since even before the virus revolutionized our lifestyles we used Amazon and Deliveroo to order gadgets and food as well as Netflix and Spotify to entertain ourselves. All from the comfort of our own house.
But during this pandemic these services have become our main way of communicating with the world: due to the lack or limited possibility to go shopping in large shopping malls, we have increasingly relied on Amazon. With no access to concerts or cinema, Netflix and Spotify have made up for this lack superbly.
But the human being is looking for and wants a certain kind of "live" experience (as already mentioned in the article on phygital) and this is why the recluse lifestyle is not sustainable for long periods of time: both economically and mentally.
It is hoped, however, that some habits after the virus may change for the better, such as carbon-free travel, more local distribution chains, more walking and cycling, and an upgrade of services and technological infrastructure. These changes could benefit the environment and help maintain the current state of pollution.
Some experts, in this regard, speculate that we may be forced to live in isolation for a long time and therefore always online, alternating our digital lives with a few weeks of "almost normal" life (the so-called yo-yo quarantine). A strongly despotic and pessimistic scenario, but realistically shared by a large number of scientists on a global scale.
To live in this new world and prevent similar situations in the future, we absolutely need to improve the health care system with pandemic response units able to move quickly to identify and contain epidemics before they start spreading (as already suggested by Bill Gates in 2015), and the ability to **quickly increase the production of medical equipment, test kits and drugs. It will be too late to stop COVID-19, but it will help with future pandemics.
I think that we will restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who has the disease and who don't, and by discriminating (ethically and fairly) who is. Some countries have already begun to use methodologies to track COVID-19 patients:
- Israel uses mobile phone location data to track people known to have the virus;
- Singapore performs a comprehensive contact search and publishes detailed data on each known case, all except identification of people by name.
- Italy is testing the Korean model for tracking the virus spread via app.
All this is scary and like Edward Snowden, I am also afraid that this temporary power governments have taken over the personal privacy, justified by the emergency situation, won't be given back to citizens at the end of it all.