What the World will look like after the Covid-19 Crisis

• The world will not be the same, one can expect heightened travel regulations and restrictions.
• While globalization has been the forefront of commerce in recent years, countries are now looking internally for self-sustenance
• The workforce will see a drastic shift from the standard office job to a more remote-friendly landscape.
• And while measures used to track and stop the spread of the virus infringe on some of our privacy, the question remains if we get them back once the pandemic is over.

Welcome to the new world, a new beginning

A new way to play, a new way a living

Cash in the past, a new way of spending

New life for man, children, and women

Nas, 1999

There’s no doubt about it, this virus will come to an end. Like several times in human history where we’ve had global pandemics, the human race will overcome. The questions that are needed to be asked is – what will the post-covid world look like?

The world as we know it will not be the same again. Like what the actions of 19 militants caused on September 11, 2001, the impact of Covid-19 will be more earth-shattering and longer-lasting.

Here are 4 ways the changes will emerge as a result of the virus:

Travel

Travel companies, airlines, and the entire tourism sector as a whole face an unprecedented challenge from the coronavirus pandemic. Travellers must trust that boarding a plane, cruise ship, or bus is safe and that they will be able to enter their destination country without much hassle.

New health safety protocols and systems will need to be in place and these are not in place yet. Some organizations and governments have taken a step in the right direction though.

The UK government is already considering a pass for people who are immune to the disease and most countries might follow suit. The pass will enable you to resume normal activities while those without immunity and the pass will continue staying at home. It is inevitable this will spill into international travel as countries might require an immunity passport for travellers. You are tested before you leave your home country and a passport bearing your immunity is given to you to enable you to travel to other countries.

Additionally, we will see the increase in touchless travel from airport doors to hotel check-ins.

Automation across all sector will be the new normal. Exchanging travel documents, check-in, border control, security, and boarding present the greatest risk of infection for travellers and the airport staff. Biometrics will play a massive part in the post-covid world will travel. No longer will people need to use their fingerprints and hands for identification. We will experience the rise of contact-less fingerprints, iris and face recognition, gait recognition technology. Technology such as gesture control, voice commands and touchless document scanning is already being tested; we can’t wait to see what these will do to travel.

International cooperation

It seems unlikely that the world will return to the idea of economic globalization that was prevalent in the 21st century. Previous pandemics did not usher in a new era of global cooperation, neither will COVID-19.

It’s in human nature to retreat to places of safety when there is danger and that’s what we’ve done during this period. Governments of the world have shut down their nations and 90% of the world’s population has stayed in their homes and watched as family, friends, and people they don’t know died. This will affect the reopening of the economy. Trust levels will remain at a low level for a long time and people will be loath to travel for a very long time.

We will see a further retreat from hyper globalization, as citizens look to national governments to protect them, and as states and firms seek to reduce further vulnerabilities. There is already a turning inwards, a search for autonomy and control of one’s destiny.

The powers of governments as increased tenfold to aid the fight against the virus. Most governments will not want to let go of these extra powers and the responsibility that comes with it. The idea of reducing these powers and sharing them with the international community will be seen as encroachment and will be rebuffed. Practically, fraying all ties we’ve built before the virus ever came calling.

Workforce

Experts predict that over 1.6 billion people will have their jobs affected or lost totally by the coronavirus. That’s half of the world’s total workforce!

With a year's worth of people applying for unemployment benefits in a single month, the coronavirus could cause an economic crisis not seen since the 1930s Great Depression.

Over 450 million businesses worldwide may not recover from the pandemic. This will cause unemployment on a scale the world has never seen before. The ones that do survive will have to look for ways to do business differently and make things work easier. More and more employees have now realized they can do a lot of their jobs from home, from their phones, or from their home computers.

Employers now conduct meetings via video conferencing software, and targets and deadlines are monitored in the same way.

The keyword will now have to be flexible employers will save money on office space going forward and there will be a lot of innovation and thinking about how people can do their job differently to time and money.

Many of those who have lost their jobs will now have to upskill or move to a totally new line of work. The average tenure of employees at a job will be drastically reduced as people switch career paths independent of distance, gender or ethnicity.

It’s not all bad news. Some sectors have boomed during this pandemic and are hiring still. As our lives have moved online or brought within the home, so food delivery services, shipping and deliveries have had their business triple and hiring increase.

The health and education sectors will see an increase in employment due to the loss in lives that the pandemic brought and the inevitable rise of homeschooling the pandemic has brought.

Privacy

Someone once defines privacy as the right to be left alone. When we measure the amount of data collected by commercial organizations, we live in a post-privacy world.

Covid-19 has highlighted the key issues for future privacy policies. In a digital world, you lose the right of being alone when you connect to a social network, and very few are willing to completely disconnect.

Governments are taking advantage of the mobile phone as a collector platform for public health reasons. This includes location, rate of walking/movement, and in some cases heart rate, diet and hours of sleep through apps. With the success that Asian countries have had with dealing with the pandemic through the use of contact tracing and apps which their citizens have to download, most western countries have now followed suit.

The question now remains – will the governments stop this data collection once the pandemic ends and what or who will have access to all the data being collated?

When COVID-19 ends, there will be a debate on whether citizen concerns over surveillance outweigh public health.

While these measures have been presented as provisional, and to be discontinued once the crisis is over, this global pandemic opens a possibility of permanent measures for monitoring disease and health using the data generated by digital devices. If this is the case, governments worldwide will have their privacy rules amended to permit it.

One thing is certain though; there will be an increase in organization and government intrusion in people’s health and lives. True privacy as we knew it is now a thing of the past.

Conclusion

While getting back a sense of normalcy isn't going to be easy and some things will definitely change, humans are tenacious creatures. We adapt to whatever situation we are presented with. Eventually, we will find our balance and that will become the new normal.

_________________________________________________________________________

written by NEWcruitment Switzerland, the Leading Technology Talent Agency Specializing in Senior IT Architects and IT Engineers in Switzerland

Contact us for a confidential discussion

This article first appeared on the Newcruitment blog at: https://www.newcruitment.ch/tech-news/what-the-world-will-look-like-after-the-covid-19-crisis