I went to a movie tonight - a documentary on old movie palaces. Leaving, I wondered if people would be even more likely to enjoy their entertainment at home.
What would you imagine might be some trends that will be sped up? Any businesses likely to go under? New business models taking off? Changes in interpersonal interaction?
It won’t. We’re eventually going to reach a point where the virus is just “out there” like the flu or chickenpox, and the current measures being taken to slow the initial spread will no longer be viable.
In the short term, there will be overreaction. For example, a Utah Jazz basketball player may have tested positive, and the NBA has decided to put the season on hiatus. Other meetings, parades, games and school events will be postponed. The market has already reacted, so it may trigger a recession or depression along with many other factors.
Countries like El Salvador have closed their borders. Since China supplies many goods, this will lead to higher prices and less availability throughout distribution chains and channels. Tourism will take a hit. Hopefully, racist blaming is avoided.
In the longer term, governments are pumping a lot of money into virology research. Hopefully this will increase our understandings and treatments for severe symptoms. Maybe there will be wider medical coverage. Large gatherings will return. Lots will get coronavirus and some will die, but I suspect far fewer than some predict. Time will tell. Perhaps it already has.
It should give a big boost to online shopping. And the more people try online shopping the more will stick with it. My own expectation is that it will be at least a couple years to go back to normal (with new treatments and vaccines by then).
More emails, fewer meetings!
My son and I had to go to a large school meeting tonight that was mandatory for him to take certain classes. We sat there the whole time listening to people cough and sneeze. It was completely useless and could easily have been done via website.
Not this specific virus per se, but the probability that (for a variety of reasons we can discuss if desired) these types of disease scares will become more common, and so social distancing will become normalized over time. There have been lots of dystopian stories about what that society looks like.
Also, social distancing is really most feasible for the top half of society. The poor are less able to afford to do it, and therefore would become more vulnerable, and more of a demand on the health care system. This worsens the economic divide, which only leads to more dystopian outcomes.
If businesses are able to continue to be successful with more workers at home, and schools & universities are able to still give good education with students learning and submitting work from home, that may actually cause some sort of widespread changes. Changes not just involving how/where we work but then where our work/classrooms are, what our transportation needs are, what our facility needs are, what sort of services are needed where (think: fast food near businesses or nearer to homes?), who is able to get what education and do what job, etc.
But, prolly not.
It may make society realize universal health care, paid sick leave and the ability to work from home are necessary for society and not luxuries.
Perhaps the people who have blithely gone through life wandering through stores coughing their heads off without covering their mouths will finally face enough societal disapproval to learn to at least cover their mouths or even, if we’re very lucky, rethink whether or not it’s fair to others to go actively sick to places they don’t need to - out to dinner, to concerts/plays/sporting events/museums, non-essential shopping - and spread their germs because their wants are far more important than anyone else’s.
Yeah - I’m not trying to be dystopian or alarmist or anything. Just wondering if people might rethink any common aspects of their lives.
I could imagine cruise lines facing challenges. Will travel involve greater costs/restrictions? Will people be less eager to attend large concerts and rallies?
I could imagine this spurring increased work-at-home, especially if employers could give up expensive office space.
I could imagine some home delivery services advertising “clean” delivery. Many people may take this as an excuse/motivation to “cocoon” more and deal with the outside world virtually when possible.
This is probably duplicative of this GD thread. I’ll report this for possible closing/merging.
I think it’ll depend on the level of the immediate disruption to daily life in the next couple of months, as well as the hospitalization/fatality rate. If life is severely disrupted, everyone who gets it feels like hammered dog shit for a few weeks and a lot of people go into the hospital and/or die, then it’ll have a pretty big impact on people I suspect. But if it turns out to be relatively mild symptoms and minor disruptions to daily life without a huge hospitalization/death rate, then people are really likely to go right back to normal and act like it never happened.
I have to figure that if people STILL go on cruises despite regular norovirus and other disease outbreaks on cruise ships having happened for decades, then something like COVID-19 isn’t going to make a dent in the cruise industry.
It won’t, in 2 years we will be back to anti vaccine nonsense and I never get a flu shot.
Coronavirus is not a flu.
Short-term, it may make a difference. Long-term - I remember SARS (also a coronavirus) in 2003. People were wearing masks and I even know of one incident where a mask-wearing person was pointing at an Asian person in a mall screaming “SARS”. But as far as I can tell, there was no long-term effect on travel or concert/rally/other large gathering attendance after SARS or even after the swine flu pandemic in 2009 ( which caused around 12,000 deaths in the US). But I will say I don’t remember the reaction to the 2009 pandemic being anything close to the current reaction- and don’t know what I must be missing that’s causing the difference.
You think your common garden variety anti-vaxxer is with it enough to know that?
Oh and:
5. The world will go full blown germaphobe. The US election will be deemed too likely to spread the virus, and the Democrats will admit Trump should just get 4 more years because of their bogus obstruction schemes. Then Trump will win in 2024, and be the first president to serve three terms.
How fast is FDR forgotten!
I foresee vast reductions in marriages and shack-ups, more living alone, thus precipitous fall in birthrates, and closed borders so no more immigrants. USA will depopulate soon. Unless… teledildonics and digital DNA-pattern transfers save the nation.
Currently (before everyone started working from home) we have lots of buildings which are empty 40% of the time. Individual homes, apartments are empty while the occupants go to work. And the work buildings are also empty 50% of the time.
If so many people work from home, and only “need” a very small presence at the office, office buildings will be smaller and more focused on spaces for working with people, rather than providing individual working spaces. Perhaps people stop going to cities for their jobs and stay in their small towns. And reduce commuting. Many people accept average commuting times of an hour or more. That’s 14 hours a week now free for other activities.