My Thoughts on the Coronavirus: 5. The Bright Side

OK, the last article was a bit dark, so let’s switch gears and look at the bright side of Covid19. Although things still look pretty grim, good things have come out of this pandemic, even right now.

Our Planet is Breathing Again

One positive side effect of the Covid19 pandemic is a consequence of the aggressive containment measures that required cities to shutdown. Since all citizens are homebound, factories are closed, flights are canceled, and streets are devoid of cars. All these resulted in a significant reduction of emissions and therefore less pollution. Besides cleaner air, the canals of Venice also cleared up due to the lack of tourists.

Although our economy is under an induced coma, it seems that mother nature can finally have a breath of fresh air. Clearly, this is a huge price to pay for a cleaner world. So don’t wait till it’s gone to act; it might be too late then. We should all pay more attention to the health of our planet as our society returns to the new normal. I said this before, if we continue to exploit our environment, we are just like a coronavirus to our planet.

Empathy and Human Connection

Some said that you can never truly know the value of something until you lose it. Whether it’s a friend, a family member, human connections, money, jobs, or just the freedom to go wherever we want, we all lost something during the Covid19 pandemic. Every loss is painful at the time, but other than the loss of life, most of the losses aren’t permanent. This enables us to reflect, re-evaluate, and reprioritize our lives.

Personally, I found this to be a good opportunity for me to reflect upon many little things that I’ve perhaps taken for granted in my life. For example, I must confess that as a geeky scientist, I sometimes find the excessive human connection to be a bit of a distraction, especially when I am busy. But now, I appreciate it more than ever, as well as many other little things.

As NY Governor—Andrew Cuomo—says, Covid19 is the “great equalizer.” We are all at risk, and we are all significantly impacted by the containment measures. So, despite the lack of physical human interaction, we’ll have more empathy as we can relate more closely to what others are experiencing. This pandemic is the single event that everyone in this world can relate to. Rather than isolating us as we fight against our common enemy, I think it will bring us together in ways that we cannot imagine. 

Human Cultural Evolution

The coronavirus pandemic has replaced many of our routines with new ones. Border closure, travel bans, shelter in place, social distancing, work from home, etc. are just a few of these new social norms. Although no one likes to change, some of these changes might be beneficial and worth keeping even after the pandemic.

Many cultural norms are simply remnants of history. They were required by the social environment some time back in history, but remained long after. Although our world has long changed, our behaviors haven’t. The sudden disruption of our social norms offers us an opportunity to evolve our culture to adapt to the modern society. 

1. Work anywhere and everywhere

Humans have evolved as social beings with many collective behaviors dating back to the agricultural era. Early on these collective behaviors were exhibited for safety and security reasons, but these behaviors persisted through the industrial age for efficiency as we leverage the division of labor.

Although we are in the digital information age now, many traditional businesses still require a majority of the workforce to be physically present. But many are rapidly modernizing through digital transformation, adopting IoT, robotics, AI, and other digital technologies. Isn’t it time to create a more distributed workforce?

It’s definitely harder to manage a distributed workforce, but the benefit is that you can get access to a much larger and diverse pool of talent. Moreover, a distributed workforce naturally creates resilience and gives the business more immunity to an epidemic or other physical disruptions.

2. A more hygiene conscious society

By now many countries around the world have already felt the impact of Covid19. So I hope everyone understands that our hands are actually pretty filthy, even though we can’t see this with our naked eye. The coronavirus simply made us recognize this fact vividly.

During this pandemic, we have adopted many creative means of greetings, everything from foot-shake, elbow bump, to a slight bow, variants of the namaste, even the Wakanda salute from Black Panther. But keep in mind that our hands are filthy regardless of this pandemic. Many common infectious diseases (e.g. seasonal flu) are asymptomatically transmitted through physical contact via our hands. Adopting non-physical means of greeting could help mitigate the impact of common infectious diseases saving billions of dollars on healthcare. Don’t underestimate the health consequences of seasonal flu. Flu death tolls are typically over tens of thousands yearly, and in some years it may be several times higher than the current death toll of Covid19.

As a society, not only should we adopt non-physical means of greeting, we should adopt more hygienic behaviors (e.g. frequent handwashing, cough and sneeze into our elbow, etc.), even after the pandemic. Come on, it’s 2020, you don’t have to be OCD like me, but we should all be more hygiene conscious.

3. Why do we still need a physical currency?

If you know something is dirty, wouldn’t you naturally avoid touching it? But one of the dirtiest objects in the world is something we can’t avoid touching. It’s money! Physical currency (i.e. banknotes and coins) are so filthy that there are ~3000 different kinds of bacteria is living on our dollar bills. However, because it’s a common medium of exchange in our economy, it’s hard to avoid touching it. With Covid19, there is less cash exchange due to the lockdown. Furthermore, people are also more conscientious about the risk of infection, so many have opted to transact digitally.

With all the digital technologies at our disposal, why do we still need a physical currency? It costs the Fed hundreds of millions yearly in terms of raw materials (i.e. papers and inks) just to print new money. What a waste! Compared to a digital currency, which won’t spread diseases, costs a lot less to print, easier to track/trace, and faster to distribute, this should be a no brainer. Moreover, countries that have wide adoption of mobile payment even see a reduction in petty crime, because no one is carrying any cash.

Now, it’s still debatable whether we should have a nationwide adoption of mobile payment, crypto-currency, or another digital medium of exchange. But don’t you think it’s time to do away with physical currency for good?

What other changes do you think we should keep coming out of the Covid19 pandemic?

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This article is part of a series, if you miss the previous installments, they are linked below.

1. Making Sense of the Reality
2. The Immediate Urgency
3. Socioeconomic Side Effect
4. The Dark Side