35 Thoughts on the consequences and impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic #1

Welcome to Future Potentialis #1

I’m Andreas Freund. I’m exploring pressing issues in tech, science and society with sources and inspirations to let you dig deeper.

—————————————————————————————————————

“attaaaggtt tataccttcc caggtaacaa accaaccaac”. No, my cat did not fall asleep on the keyboard, this is the beginning of the DNA code of the coronavirus, which is only eight kilobytes in size. While Our World in Data keeps you updated on the current number of infections and deaths, in this newsletter I want to present you

35 Thoughts on the consequences and impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic:

1.The lock down measures are obviously hurting a lot of small businesses. Even those not affected by liquidity problems, might realize due to a forced break that their grind is not worth the effort and that they are better of pursuing other things. (This is especially true for barely profitable bars/restaurants, which there are a lot.)

2. Remote work will stay more entrenched and lead to more flexibility for workers and lower congestion and possibly real estate prices in popular cities. It is an unequal opportunity as low skilled work (retail, distribution supply chain, drivers...) offers fewer opportunities for remote work.

3. A short-time working model in which the working time is halved and the state - depending on the income level- makes up to 90% of the previous net wages makes sense. This enables companies to retain qualified workers when economic conditions improve, and these workers can be fully employed again. But it would also be a good test run for drastically reduced working hours. With rising automatisation this could maintain the social status of work, where full employment is the highest goal. Or with unemployment on the rise, and suddenly billions of dollars of aid available, a form of universal basic income will be established.

4. Quality of work and your value to your employer will be exposed by the forced telework. Entrenched positions no longer necessary will become clearly visible and no longer deniable. It won’t be easy to claim credit for work you didn’t do and harder to delegate to others to do it for you. Even if you do work, firms will realize that they can do equally well with quite a lot less.

5. Conversely, keeping the most valuable employees happy will become more important than ever, as with increased family and personal time, they might not get back to the gruesome 80+hour weeks..

6. Increased personal time with fewer commitments and things to do will lead to more contemplation, meditation and realization to see what makes one happy or not (and more Netflix of course). If you are stuck 24/7 with your partner, it has to be an active choice you are happy with, not something you barely tolerate. (China’s divorce rates spiked after the lock down)  Also, with an extended quarantine people will become more aware what they are missing in terms of quality of life. Having a balcony, a country house easily reachable from your home in a dense city etc. becomes more desirable as hotels and possibly borders are being closed.

7. The value of conferences will be questioned, especially the now virtual ones. With keynotes often predictable, their value comes form enabling collaborations, which often arise during coffee breaks. To virtualize chance encounters is very difficult. Virtual conference startup Hopin’s, Chatroulette inspired solution is to randomly pair attendants via Videochat. Forcing the use of real names will probably eliminate the infamous constant stream of people flashing their genitals known from Chatroulette, but virtual conferences are still likely to remain awkward.

8. Unsurprisingly live streaming is on the rise and the remote conferencing software Zoom saw an increase in stock price and popularity and other tools like Skype are getting more users as well.

8b. Surprisingly, live-streaming has become a popular tool for farmers to sell their fruits and vegetables online directly to consumers via Alibaba’s Taobao platform that would have otherwise gone to waste.

9. Schools and universities have moved to live streaming, pushing digital learning into the mainstream. Although it will have the same troubles as conferences in terms of fostering connections between strangers, tools are quite well adapted, even enabling group work. I think expensive universities will come out (long overdue) as losers, as their high fees will become even less justifiable, when countless of their peers – including top universities- offer their courses for free. It should not be forgotten that closed schools disproportionally hurt disadvantaged children.

10. Humans are creatures of habit. An extended lock down will create new habits. With gyms closed more often than not these will lead to less exercise and workouts. It will require additional effort to reform these habits, which will make life even harder for your already badly affected favorite fitness center.

11. This is also true for spending habits, which are now under personal review, especially as instant gratification shopping becomes harder and harder due to shop closures and longer delivery times of non-essential goods.

12. Virtual museums are here to stay. Google digitalized the collections of over 2,500 museums, including the Guggenheim in New York and Bilbao, as well as the Albertina in Vienna. Although they hardly can substitute the serendipitous discovery and connections you make during a museum visit, these guided explorations of masterpieces like Durer’s “The Hare” are something else.

13a. NPR’s popular TinyDesk concert format, where musicians perform in a small room have started their next round of competitions. I think it is a format that provides an intimate moment with the artist and has the chance to somewhat substitute the lack of concerts.

13b. The New York Metropolitan Opera, as well as the Vienna State Opera are streaming live, which potentially will broaden their audience, and make it a little less elite.

14. There is a lot of forced adaption. The SARS outbreak of 2002/03 in China is credited with mainstreaming e-commerce. This too will push e-commerce and deliveries to the next level and be a huge step towards a cashless society. Amazon is hiring more than 100k workers in the US, grocery delivery startup Instacart more than 300k.

15. Supply chains will become more independent and more resilient in the future, with single points of failures like all components depending on one region like China eliminated.

16. As return policies are relaxed and companies are more accommodating, this will likely become expected in the future as well The same goes for easy to contact, message based customer support, which eliminates endless call episodes on hold.

17. Having all restaurants turned to delivery only, has to be a dream scenario for companies like Delivery Hero and Takeaway. Since many doubt that food delivery could ever be profitable due to its high fixed costs, it is their chance to prove them wrong.

18. With governments closing down all non-essential retail, I miss developments in making even more retail work not essential, and thus having fewer people risk being infected. Amazon Go stores don’t need cashiers because of its camera and sensor based “Just Walk Out” technology. I would have expected a quicker roll out and adoption. Especially since Amazon is selling the technology.

19. Forcing a postponement of almost all non-essential doctor visits (dentists, optometrists) will likely be the subject of a lot of future studies and have quite a bit of diametric effects and cause suffering down the road. A lot more damage is done of course by postponing operations and even cancer treatments.

20. Video consultations for primary care is likely going to stay even when the crisis ends. And things are likely to move faster in the medical sphere in general – the UK chose its eleven suppliers after a 48-hour tender.

21. Drug and disease tests will accelerate even further enabling much shorter developing time.
Mologic, which also developed an Ebola quick test, and whose scientific director is the inventor of the rapid pregnancy test, is working on a rapid test for the Coronavirus that does not require electricity or laboratory analysis. (However, a first product is still at least six months away.) Jonathan M. Rothberg, whose pharmaceutical companies developed rapid DNA sequencing has presented a design for an easy-to-produce and inexpensive rapid test. Scientists from the University of California at San Francisco are developing a CRISPR-based 30-minute rapid test.
AbCellera and Eli Lilly are developing treatments using antibodies. The first tests with patients should take place in four months. However, if a vaccine is developed, only the response of polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk is appropriate.

22. The benefits of universal healthcare will become even more apparent and might finally push the US to abandon their horribly unjust health system. As Yuval Noah Harari points out, aiding other countries’ health system is beneficial for ourselves as well, as this enables other countries- which might be the future outbreak of a pandemic- to contain it early or prevent additional mutations of the virus from happening.

23. I also share Harari’s take on the importance of international collaboration, especially in the EU: “If the more fortunate members of the EU swiftly and generously send money, equipment and medical personnel to help their hardest-hit colleagues, this would prove the worth of the European ideal better than any number of speeches. If, on the other hand, each country is left to fend for itself, then the epidemic might sound the death-knell of the union”. Though not an EU member, Serbia’s president decried  "European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale. The only country that can help us in this hard situation is the People's Republic of China. For the rest of them, thanks for nothing."       

24. While it might seem that police is relaxing a little on minor infractions like parking tickets, long-term, I see a shift towards more law and order and “rules are rules”. With one state of emergency being declared after another and Covid-19 laws rushed through parliaments opportunities for abuse of power are ripe. In Hungary, Prime Minister Victor Orban can now rule by by decree, bypassing the legislature on any law, as long as the crisis lasts.

25. Telecoms are (sometimes voluntarily) sharing location data of their customers with the government to help them manage quarantine and understand population flows. (UK, Austria) This privacy vs. safety tradeoff might be reasonable now but is likely to stick and have worrying consequences down the road. Contact tracing apps and the combination of health data with other data sources like immigration databases – as was the case with Taiwan – are also privacy nightmares.

25b. Social Media sites like Pinterest and Twitter and streaming platforms like Spotify all publish in their headers Covid-19 advisories by the government. People in Singapore, get information from a government WhatsApp account. Although in this case clearly beneficial, it might be abused in the future.

26. Governments will be held accountable for shortages for essential things like masks, which are relatively easy to produce and therefore inexcusable. To some extent this holds true for ventilators as well.

27. Open designs and 3D printing could help prevent shortages. There is now a 3D printed design of a ventilator for under $100, a MIT paper describes a cheap portable ventilator with low power consumption and Project OpenAir lets everybody collaborate on the development of an open source, scalable, safe, and easy to use DIY ventilator for use in hospitals. And if all else fails, one can always rely on human ingenuity. Like this Chinese men who was kept alive for five years with a homemade ventilator which had to be squeezed 18 times per minute.

Whereas a wristband that teaches you to not touch your face via vibrations at first sight seems like a good idea, this function is easily implementable in a smartwatch.

28. Repurposed innovation is rapidly spreading. Kinnos – founded after the Ebola crisis because doctors complained about the dangers of decontamination - makes colorized disinfectant to ensure surfaces are covered. Drugs originally developed for other uses, like Chloroquine (Malaria) or Actemra (Rheumatoid arthritis), as well as the experimental Remdesivir are now considered for treating Covid-19 patients.

29. Elevator buttons, escalator handrails, ATMs, airplanes, and public transportation could be retrofitted with battery powered UVC22nm units to be regularly disinfected. Using small sticks to press elevator buttons like in China is also a quick effective hack.

30. AI can identify threats early. BlueDot an AI company that tracks, contextualizes and anticipates infectious disease risks, identified an article on 31 December about “pneumonia of unknown cause” and issued an alert to its clients almost one week before the WHO issued its public alert. The company published the likely destinations for spread of 2019-nCoV (SARS-CoV-2) in the Journal of Travel Medicine.

31. The right to repair which allows consumers the ability to repair and modify their own consumer electronic device will possibly be easier to push trough and to enforce. While handing out financial lifebuoys to companies, now would be a good time for the EU to carry through such otherwise unpopular measures with companies. This has benefits for the environment as well, as less resources are wasted by throwing out easy to repair devices.

32. Animal based origin of Covid-19 and those of the Bird/Swine flu and many others should strengthen animal welfare activist’s arguments and help push some people in eating meat more conscientiously and/or become vegetarian.

33. With old people both being most vulnerable to the disease and to the side effect of the disease – namely social distancing- programs like this, which connected young Brazilian students with retirement homes to let them practice English by video chatting with elderly Americans,  are more important than ever.

34. There will be tons of interesting studies for years to come. Like how crime changes during a lock down (domestic violence and online fraud up, break-ins down?), the effects of postponing or holding elections and the effects casino closures on the number of gambling addicts.

35. Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have all been confronted with Covid-19 early and came out relatively well, as they learned their lessons form previous disease outbreaks like SARS and H1N1. Bill Gates has been warning of a deadly pandemic for years. Next time, there will be even less excuse to be unprepared.

Thank you for reading. Let me know in the comments what you agree/disagree with and what other consequences I have missed.

Stay safe and have a nice weekend,

Andreas

Thanks for subscribing to Future Potentials. This post is public, so feel free to share it.