The Covid Chronicles: What Lies Ahead?

Given the planet just endured two-plus years of pandemic with millions of deaths, thousands of cases of “long-Covid”, numerous business and personal bankruptcies and major disruption of travel and supply chains, you might expect some major changes to the world going forward. Based on history, if you do so, you will be wrong!

For the most part, what will change? Mostly those things that were already changing. And some will revert a little after more profound initial change! Why? Pandemics are by definition unusual periods, and even when they occur more frequently (we’ve been 100 years between them), they primarily are experienced as something odd which only heightens the desire for normalcy: to get back to the way things were. Historians have spilled much ink on why the Spanish Flu pandemic back in 1918-21 period caused so many casualties (roughly ten times more deaths than Covid, against a global population 1/4 as large!) but had so few lasting effects. Once it was done, people were done with it. You can see this happening with the corona virus already, even though we’re technically not out of the woods yet. But there are some trends which were accelerated by the pandemic, and those changes will prove more lasting. They are:

1. Work-Life balance. Many people (especially in the US) began to re-evaluate whether they were living to work or working to live, and whether success really is a matter of how many toys you can acquire before you die and go into the great nothingness that lies beyond. Classic wisdom already taught these lessons, and Christianity reinforced them, but they were lost among the Boomers and Gen X’rs. The terrifying possibility of random death from an unseen virus had the salutary effect of focusing the mind on what’s important. Sadly, this will be a temporary effect, as if you have no classic learning or faith-driven worldview to fall back on, one will gradually fall back into the same old bad habits. Already some took the wrong lesson that life is so short, random, and purposeless that it’s okay to jettison spouses, leave children, quit jobs or whatever else you need to do to define your own happiness if but for a fleeting moment. But not everyone, and in the meantime, people are considering their options. Working less, spending more time with family, acquiring less.
2. Virtual/online work and services. These were already a thing, but got a big boost during the pandemic. Backsliding? Sure. Yes, it’s great to order things online, but given the opportunity to see something first, feel it or try it on, there will always be some pull to do just that. As to work, the lessons of online organizational behavior are well understood and have not been changed by the pandemic. High functioning teams need to work together in person first; then they can move to remote or online coordination of activities. The military has lived this way since the dawn of the radio. You train together, you establish standards and ways of doing things, you create communication procedures, and then you can go out and be geographically -distant but still interact successfully. The reverse is not the case. So all the moves toward work-from-home will first involve some portion of working together in an office to establish team-building, norm-setting, and patterns of behavior before going virtual. Of course if your job literally requires no coordination with others, you might be able to go full time at home. But . . .
3. White collar offshoring. Most people are familiar with what happened during the “China shock” when much of the world’s production got moved to cheaper producers, first in China and then elsewhere in SouthEast Asia. In the States, it hollowed out the manufacturing base, leading to huge job losses, increasing poverty in the middle of the nation, and more deaths of despair. The pandemic showed that many white collar jobs can be done from home, and such workers used this leverage to spend far more time that way: congratulations to them. Of course, what can be done away from the office can be done at home, or can be done very far away from home (i.e., offshore). Some of this was already apparent: before the pandemic, there was a growing market for accountants and tax advisers based in India, speaking English, and specializing in low-cost services targeted to US laws. That will grow in the future, and will directly challenge the work-from-home gains of the white collar workers.
4. Generational fragility. There was a generation once-upon-a-time that was born into horse-drawn travel (circa 1886) and lived to see the moon landing (1969). They witnessed rampant diseases, several world wars, the upending of dynasties and empires, and vast technological and social change. They didn’t even get a fancy nickname, and what they experienced was just called life. The pandemic has induced huge increases in social pathology among Millenials (born 1981-1996) and Gen Z (born 1997-2012). Young adults are saying they face an unhappy future with too much debt, a destroyed climate, and poor work prospects. School children are demonstrating increasing rates of self-harm, mental illness, and other destructive behaviors up to and including suicidal ideation. The sight of society’s adult leaders (mostly Boomers or older) running around in a panic didn’t help. I won’t go all Boomer here and point out the facts of today’s world don’t fit well with the Millenial or Gen Z complaints. The fact is that’s how they feel and they’re making themselves sick over it. It was bad before the pandemic; it got worse during the pandemic. Generations (remember, all individuals are different) rarely change their spots over time.
5. Pay for the low-end of the work scale. Inequality was actually ebbing during the Trump years before the pandemic. Data during the pandemic will be skewed by temporary government programs and policies, but I suggest when the data returns to normal, we’ll see more positive news here. Why? Partly because the pandemic created an imbalance between the number of jobs (many) and the number of workers (fewer) which forced pay increases. Some of this pressure will be relieved by automation and increased immigration. But if America’s economy keeps gowing in the long run, and some younger workers decide not to compete but to redefine success, there won’t be enough supply for the demand in many essential jobs like teachers, police, etc. Which will lead to many changes, one of which will be better pay for those remaining.
6. A renewed health care debate (in the US). Nobody likes the US health care system, mostly because it is not a system, it is a patchwork of compromises between States, the federal government, and various lobbies (Big Pharma, doctors, lawyers, hospitals, and investment firms). No sane person would design this “system.” It is expensive and exclusionary (sometimes your insurance doesn’t guarantee any care). However, it performs some tasks better than its rivals. It innovates better, producing more new drugs, procedures, and equipment. Why? Because one can make a ton of money when you do so. It offers better preventive medicine, because that is cost effective. It offers more choices than any other system, although those choices are not equally available. In effect, the US system is the perfect American complement. It complements the many state-run health systems throughout the world by being the high-risk, high payoff health care lab. It complements the American character because it lets you choose to have as much or as little health care as you want, and from exactly the doctor you like. And it complements the legal system by being a source of endless lawsuits, whether of little merit or tremendous consequence. How will the pandemic effect on American health care play out? None of the large government systems did better. Big Pharma did find a vaccine. Some Americans lacked health care and simply died because of it. My guess is little will change here, with perhaps the addition of a catastrophic care regime available to all, financed by the state and federal governments.
7. Speaking of government, I intended to say here that national health authorities must have learned a lot about what not to do, and that should serve us well going forward with communicable diseases. I intended to say that until the monkeypox virus came along and demonstrated that those same health officials (in the US at least) who loudly called for following the science were just as capable as Donald Trump of ignoring the science when it gored a favorite ox. Monkeypox is an endemic African disease that occasionally slips out of the continent and quickly dissipates because it takes sustained contact to spread. The current monkeypox global health emergency was traced to random group sex events in Europe among men who have sex with men. Over 99% of the cases fell into this group; others were secondarily tied (e.g., family members). Rather than broadcast these facts, health officials continued to say “everyone is at risk” and not make the obvious call for voluntary cancellation of high-risk events planned for Pride month. They left a serious but treatable disease to spread among a vulnerable population because they feared the possibility of fomenting homophobia. Anybody associated with this fiasco should be fired. Let’s hope the remaining health authorities learn from this case before the next one hits.

8. Cinema is dead; movies are dying. Movie theater revenues plateaued before the pandemic, as they increasingly raised prices to make up for fewer tickets sold. The pandemic shut them down, and while they experienced some immediate recovery when restrictions were lifted, they retain the same problems as before: ridiculous prices, aging infrastructure, poor quality product (Fast & Furious XXV?), and competition from the stay-at-home-and-stream experience. There will always be cinemas, just like there are still some drive-ins. But they will become a niche product for certain wide-screen, or 3D, or “big event” films. Likewise, I’ll posit the movie as an artform is in serious trouble. Think about the great years for movies: 1939 (Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Mr. Smith goes to Washington); 1982 (ET, Gandhi, Blade Runner, and Sophie’s Choice); 1976 (Rocky, Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, and Network); 1962 (Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate). Today’s hits are often retreads, remakes, or action movies resembling video games. If you want to make money, you drag the story out on a streaming service. Audiences reward instant action and no character development: the cinematic equivalent of junk food. The only thing which consistently succeeds is excess: more violence, more sex, more action in less time. Movies were a medium that rewarded clever story-telling captured in a finite time (two or so hours) and a finite space (the cinema). That environment is going, going gone, both physically (cinemas) and metaphorically (the audience).

9. Nationalism. Often confused with fascism by those who understand neither, there was a growing trend toward greater nationalism (a preference for one’s own country at the expense of others) before the pandemic, and the corona virus highlighted the reasons why. In the end, nations have governments which look out for their people: even dictators need means to address the desires of the population, if only to control them. When the corona virus stuff hit the fan, free-travel Europe became “let me see your papers Europe” again. Island nations locked down, even from close neighbors (I’m looking at you, New Zealand). Countries withheld personal protective gear destined for others; the US even reached out to corner the market on some vaccines. Nations looked out for themselves, as they always have. Charles de Gaulle was right: “No nation has friends, only interests.” People got all wrapped up in the bonhomie of globalism and travel and “aren’t we all the same deep down underneath?” The short answer is “yes” until it isn’t. So look for more national (vice global) approaches going forward.

Sorry, that’s all I have. I hope you have found these musings on Covid interesting. If you think I left something important out, please add it in the comments. As for me, I swear off any more covid posting!