Corona is here to stay. So let`s learn to live with it

Below is a bleak but rather excellent article from The Times. For those of you with limited time but that like a few interesting bullet points this is for you:

• World Health Organisation say - "It is not going to be “cured”, so that we can go back to our previous lives"
• Zoom made us more efficient. Some will use it (or similar to date)
• The 2nd phase is about adjustment, learning to live with it, medically and economically, but also socially, culturally and psychologically
• The infection-resistant cubicle will replace open-plan office (not sure about that)
• Anxiety, frustration and stress are already reflected in a steep rise of domestic violence (UK and here)

LONDON - The Times - Ben Macintyre

It is not going away soon or, perhaps, ever. We are not going to wake up one day virus-free, and return to a historical “normal”. Coronavirus is with us for the foreseeable future.

Its impact will diminish, and is already doing so as the first phase of the pandemic ebbs. Better treatments will render it less lethal. The virus will grow milder as immunity spreads.

Eventually, a vaccine will be found. But even that will not be a magic bullet, killing off the scourge with a shot through the heart.

Michael Ryan, the emergencies chief at the World Health Organisation, is blunt: “This virus may never go away. I think it’s important to put that on the table.”

Like measles or chicken pox, Covid-19 is likely to circulate in society for decades, as four endemic coronaviruses already do, causing the common cold, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling. It is not going to be “cured”, so that we can go back to our previous lives.

The storm will pass,” Yuval Noah Harari wrote recently in the Financial Times. “Humankind will survive, most of us will still be alive — but we will inhabit a different world.” What will that world be like?

If the first phase of the coronavirus was about containment, the second will be about adjustment and absorption, learning to live with it, medically and economically, but also socially, culturally and psychologically. The disease will affect, sometimes radically and sometimes almost imperceptibly, every aspect of human existence: work, study, sport, shopping, travel, social interaction and family relations.

Many of those changes will be jolting and alien; but some may bring unanticipated blessings.

The future may be one without handshakes and rush hours, where a visit to grandparents is routinely preceded by a diagnostic health check. We may no longer browse for books, or check the squashiness of an avocado before buying. Doors may come without manual handles. Robots will increasingly perform jobs that could have infected a human. The middle seat in the aircraft may be a thing of the past.

The world will look very different, seen through the germ-barrier of a perspex screen. There may be fewer public smiles, our expressions hidden behind ubiquitous facemasks. But as the disease continues to circulate, and we persist in many of the behaviours it has imposed, we may have much more of a commodity that was undervalued in the age before Covid: time for ourselves.

The world of work will never be the same, with remote offices, socially distanced decision-making, home working for those lucky enough to have space. The Zoom boom has demonstrated the efficiency of online meetings, and the necessity to keep them short. The infection-resistant cubicle will replace open-plan as the anti-viral office layout of choice.

The contactless office is already in development. We will work at different times of day, and undoubtedly more often from home.

For many years to come, gathering around the water-cooler or in the canteen will carry a risk. We will observe our colleagues, and ourselves, for the first sign of illness; coming to work feeling off-colour, once a mark of British stiff-upper-lippery, will be seen as an act of reckless selfishness, a sackable offence.

Preserving personal space will become second nature: already people swerve off paths when anyone approaches and feel a flash of irritation when someone stands too close in a queue. These are new instincts. They may never go away.

Shopping will return, but it will be different. In a world where we must line up, wait, eschew the fitting room, not touch the wares and bounce away from other shoppers as if repelled by magnets on opposite polls, many will prefer to shop from home, and acquire less.

Since the crisis erupted we have become more technology-dependent, faster than anyone could have imagined and the gap between those who can master and afford the technology, and those who cannot, has grown to a chasm.

What will love, and the quest for it, be like? “Dating will be entirely online,” one twentysomething told me. The finding, meeting, courting, daring and deciding will be entirely virtual for many; initial physical contact may be more freighted than anything in the history of sex.

It is illogical of course. As the pandemic wanes, we should be able to retreat from social distance and re-embrace social proximity, but we will not, at least not for a long time, for the fear is not about biological science but perception, the habits of separation and anxiety that will have become engrained in us all. The young will throw this off first, of course; the old, perhaps, never. “How long will this last?” a friend in her nineties wondered. “This alienation from everyone else will probably last for the rest of my life. I am not sure I want that.”

In a very short space, we have learnt to entertain ourselves at home: watching television, reading, gardening, even talking with fellow inmates in our separate lockdowns. Those habits will endure, at least for a while. We will not rush back into cinemas, theatres and concert halls, to music and book festivals, and when we do, enjoyment will carry an uncomfortable trepidation.

Sport will restart remotely; both players and viewers will get used to live sport in inert stadiums. Some sports, like cricket, have social distancing built into the game, but who will be able to watch the first rugby match of the post-Covid season without wondering what germs are being exchanged inside the scrum?

The impact will be felt in schools and universities long after we have come to accept that the virus is here to stay: remote lectures, emptier classrooms, restricted interactions, fewer foreign students. About 120,000 Chinese students will not be coming to Britain next year. Homeschooling has been a nightmare for many, but a boon for some.

Screens and swabs, testing and tracing, masks and mass unemployment: these are the physical manifestations of an altered society. But many of the changes will be less visible: a greater obedience to social pressure and government demands in some, angry rebellion among others; greater neighbourliness, but increased distrust. The disease has opened up old divisions that will not swiftly heal: between classes, generations, and the split, so deep in British society, between town and country. The trauma, anxiety, frustration and stress are already reflected in a steep rise of domestic violence, but it will also be measured for years in a wave of depression and other mental health problems.

As long as Covid lingers, which is probably for ever, society may be prepared to sacrifice privacy for health: the apps revealing where we have been and who we have seen, the temperature monitors and thermal-image cameras at airports and stations checking up on us, without being asked or granted permission to do so. Surrendering biometric data to government is a dangerous path. As Harari writes: “Imagine North Korea in 2030, when every citizen has to wear a biometric bracelet . . . If you listen to a speech by the Great Leader and the bracelet picks up the tell-tale signs of anger, you are done for.”

Some good may come of it all. Great crises tend to produce an efflorescence of creativity when they recede. Cycle paths will spread through cities. Sick leave will no longer be a sign of weakness, but a civic duty. We will never behave, or think, as we once did. But humans are astonishingly adaptable, and robustly forgetful. Quite soon, we will no longer remember what society was like before, and we may face this different world, and its changed inhabitants, with renewed courage and appreciation. “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t.”

Coronavirus arrived as a threat but will remain as part of the fabric of life, one more great turn in the wheel of human experience, a new chapter in our evolution.