Migration after CV

The Quarantine Zone
1

I’ve been wondering if the CV is going to affect migration patterns in either the short term or the long term.

My wife and I are both thankful that we live in a distant suburb so that we have our acre to play on but we still have good medical care close but we are still looking at moving to a small city 20% of the size of our current one. My friends in NYC are saying that if this work from home thing is successful, they are going to leave the city for NC. They are basically trapped in their house with two small kids and see the disease situation as worth moving if they can practically work from home anywhere.

My assumption is that the big cities are going to get hit hard by CV due to people being on top of each other and the very rural part are going to get hard due to lack of medical facilities (something like 20% of counties don’t have a ventilator). I think that there will be at least a short-term trend of people fleeing big cities and moving either to the suburbs or smaller cities. Due to the potential of remote working I think this will primarily be middle class people making the move. Though as there are fewer dining options in the big cities, we’ll see the service and hospitality jobs move too. Of course, the back side of this is that I think rural areas will empty out more they already have a demographic problem and with CV on top of that I’d predict that their population decline will increase.

I think mid-sized metro areas 250K-750K will see population growth in the next decade and large cities will see slight declines and rural areas will see larger declines.

2

I won’t speculate on long-term USA population shifts - beyond my pay grade. But I expect short-term movement. More active weather means more storms, floods, and wildfires. NOAA forecast upwards of 40 million Americans will be flooded in 2020. California has had a droughty winter. And a viral inferno is about to burn through the South, where millions of relatively young men have high risk factors: heart disease, cancer, lung disease, obesity, hypertension, or diabetes. Throw in the South’s high poverty, segregation, and substandard healthcare and we can expect really bad shit. (cite)

Short-term, I expect internal migration out of the South and flyover states. The Bible Belt will start to depopulate as congregants sicken. Southern coastal populations will move to somewhere not so storm-lashed. As soon as America “opens up,” it’ll relocate.