A futurist's take on coronavirus

A few people have asked me what my "futurist" take is on coronavirus. I think most people are still adjusting to the new reality we'll be living in for the next few weeks or months, so I'm not sure anyone has developed a clear vision of how things might look after that. And honestly I've probably spent more time driving around looking for toilet paper than I have thinking about the long-term future. But here are a few initial thoughts to start a conversation.

My first thought is that it looks like coronavirus has accelerated many of the things that were happening already - like the growth of online retail, moving more meetings and doctor's visits online, voting by mail, video surveillance of public spaces, the use of drones, the need for government transparency and international collaboration in light of our global connectedness (even if the collaboration is around closing borders!), etc. (Even a universal basic income - at least $1,000 for each American adult - is starting to look likely!) So in a sense we were more prepared for coronavirus than one might have expected, simply because these things were happening anyway.

My second thought has to do with a speech I've given quite a few times that points to 2020 as the start of what Dr. Jonas Salk called "Phase B" of human evolution. Here are the key points. From the earliest days of humans until 1965, the human population curve was concave up, meaning that population growth was accelerating. From 1965 to 2020, human population has been a straight line - basically an elongated inflection point between concave up and concave down. As of 2020, according to the UN projections, population growth will decelerate until we stabilize between 11 and 12 billion sometime around 150 years from now. Looking at this graph as a biologist, Jonas Salk (who also created the polio vaccine) said that we were moving from Phase A of human evolution to Phase B, and that each phase had its own set of values. (Phase A values were things like survival and growth. It was hard for Salk to predict the Phase B values since he was writing in the early 1970s.) So life might look very different in Phase B since it will align to new (or at least expanded) values. (This assumes - which Salk did not - that we will make it successfully through the transition, which not every species does. I'm looking at you, lemurs.) So without sounding too teleological, I'm open to the notion that there could be a significant event in 2020 that crystallizes the new values of Phase B (collaboration? equity? sustainability?) and sets us off on our new concave-down trajectory. This makes me wonder if we (and/or our descendants) will look back on coronavirus as a rather formative experience for the human species.

My third thought has to do with the role of public health. Public health had its heyday in the early 20th century, when people had started to figure out the science of infectious disease, and infectious disease played a prominent role in societal life. With the advent of things like vaccines and antibiotics, infectious disease become less of a concern relatively speaking, and chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease rose in importance for the health care and public health communities. Chronic disease is often related to behavior (and other social determinants), so it has been easier for the healthy to say, "That's not my problem." People started talking more about "population health," which is really the aggregate individual health of a community (obesity rates, disease prevalence, etc.), than about "public health," which generally has to do with things like sanitation and infectious disease that affect us all. With this swift, life-altering return of infectious disease, I fully expect that public health will once again be seen as a critical societal competence, like economic management and national defense.

My fourth thought is somewhat political I suppose. Several countries have made some bad decisions over the past few years, with disproportionate support from older people. Trump and Brexit in particular come to mind, though there are others. If a pandemic that disproportionately affected older people reached a certain level, I wonder if it would start to have significant political consequences. I'm not just talking about large death rates among older people, but also about older people's reduced willingness to participate in the process. For example, Florida will hold its primary tomorrow. Since around 20% of the state's residents are over age 65, how many of those presumably high-risk people will turn out? And what if the pandemic is with us in some form until November?

My fifth thought comes from my book, Reframing Poverty, which you really should read during your upcoming PTO ("pandemic time off"). At some point in there I say that two seemingly opposed things are true. First, we are all connected. Second, we are each completely alone. Nothing drives that point home more than a pandemic. Yes, we're all in this together and we as communities need to respond in ways that protect the most vulnerable among us and get as many people as possible through this. And ... we all need to batten down the hatches and keep to ourselves for a while. The Meades are in near lockdown at this point. Our schools are closed and both my wife and I can work from home, so that's our strategy for right now. Our kids are baking cookies together right now, perhaps having realized that each is the other's only in-person friend for at least the next few weeks.

For all of us, how we come out of this pandemic will probably turn on how we decide to manage the tension between our interconnectedness and our solitude.