When will this all be over? That’s the question that’s on everyone’s mind in these pandemic days. There are really two answers, of course. One relates to how long it will be before human interactions won’t be significantly hampered by the virus, and the other relates to how long it will be before behaviors return to normal, even given the lessening of risk. The latter is the one I’m best qualified to talk about, but some general comments on the first one are required to level-set. Remember, I’m not a doctor and these are simply my views as a researcher.
It’s very unlikely that a vaccine will be available broadly before the first quarter of 2021. First responders could get one a little sooner, but for most industrial countries, at least, the vaccine probably won’t be available to the mass population until February or early March. Then it becomes a question of how quickly people get the vaccine, how effective it is, and what level of natural immunity is really present in the population.
In the meantime, we are seeing more and more treatments for COVID, treatments not aimed at eliminating the disease but at reducing the rate of complications or fatalities. These are already available, and will be available in greater numbers through the fall and winter, to the point where some medical experts I’ve chatted with tell me that the fatality rate in the industrial world will likely fall to about 10% of the spring peak rate, making COVID no more serious than a bad flu season. However, these treatments are less likely to reduce hospitalizations; my contacts expect them to decline by no more than about a third.
The imponderable, on the medical side, is how cooperative the population will be. Today US surveys show only about two-thirds of people would get a vaccine if one was offered. Other countries seem to have much higher levels of vaccine acceptance, up to 90%. Mask wearing and social distancing, which now seem more effective in halting the spread of the disease, have been politicized in the US but are better accepted elsewhere. If we do all the right things, then we could see rapid and real recovery even this fall. If not….
Where all this leaves us is that there will still be a perceived (and real) risk of contracting COVID well into late fall and winter. People will almost surely tend to avoid risk by altering behavior, in proportion to what they believe their real risk to be. The young, obviously, seem to be more risk-takers here. Among my own contacts, I found it interesting that people under 30 and unmarried were twice as likely to disregard or minimize COVID risks as those married or older.
Let’s leave the medical side now. Industries that necessarily expose people to masses of others who may have COVID are going to be affected by the perceived risk of contagion. Travel, sports, theaters, dining, and related businesses aren’t going to see full recovery until the perception of risk is much lower, meaning, I suspect, the April/May 2021 timeframe. Even then, most are unlikely to return to their old levels. People have learned new behaviors, become conditioned to new fears.
We’re currently in a revenue/spending positive-feedback slump. Companies see sales fall, so they spend less, which causes other companies to see sales fall, and so forth. This kind of situation prevails until the cycle is broken by something, and the something that’s already doing it is a shift in behavior and business methods that accommodate the risk of being proximate to a lot of potentially infected people. It’s that adaptation to conditions that then becomes the norm, and it’s the new norm that determines whether there’s a fast exit to the old norm, or whether things change…maybe forever.
Retail may be the best example of this principle. Smaller retailers have a lower probability of surviving extended virus impact, and even the larger retailers have been hit with traffic reductions and lower sales. As a result, many have stopped stocking less-popular items, and that has forced buyers to turn to online sources. Amazon’s interest in turning empty department store sites in malls into fulfillment centers is proof of the fact that online sales are now in our blood. I’ve found for myself that about a third of the things I used to go to a “big box” store for are now out of stock there, so I’m buying things online that I never had before. So are others.
And what about office businesses? Employers have found that many of their employees are actually more productive working remotely than they would be in the office, and almost all have told me that “business travel” was far less efficient than online meetings and calls. This, without a significant number of truly innovative tools to aid in virtual meetings and collaboration. There are products in the pipeline that will do much better, and those products will further shift the balance away from in-person collaboration. Without a benefit driver for worker collectivism, what’s the role of an office?
Remember that we don’t have to prove that an office is a lot better than remote work, or even better at all. We just have to prove that remote work, in the balance, is preferable to accepting the risk of having a big chunk of the workforce come down with COVID. Same with shopping, same with entertainment. Even travel is going to be impacted for years. People are very antsy over the image of sitting on an airplane with a bunch of maskless companions, or being delayed and possibly missing connections because planes had to return to the gate because of passenger non-compliance with mask rules. Why not drive?
We are re-learning our living patterns. Many countries in Asia that I’ve visited over the years embraced wearing masks just to reduce routine infections. How many in the US and other industrial nations will do the same, especially if there’s a lingering COVID risk for years, even decades? And this, without considering that there are plenty more new viruses where COVID came from. There’s been long-term scientific speculation that most of our major diseases crossed over between animals and humans because of specific conditions of close contact, often including butchering in proximity to people.
Tech is going to adapt to this, and in fact it’s likely to see a big of a resurgence. There are many software products that have failed, along with their companies, because new features could no longer deliver new benefits. Look at Novell and NetWare. If “work” is now virtual, then much of the technology that supports it will have to be optimized for that new situation. Same with shopping, same with entertainment. Might people who no longer feel safe at concerts buy big TVs with powerful and feature-rich sound systems? It seems likely.
Perhaps the biggest reason we can’t say that this will all be over soon is that it shouldn’t be. As bad as COVID has been, it could have been a lot worse. We could, just as easily, had a crossover virus that had Ebola’s fatality rate and the contagion of the flu or measles, and killed half the human race. It would be nice to think that everyone will have learned from this, that the basic vulnerabilities and risk factors would be addressed effectively. Nice, but far from certain. Until we see that something positive and systemic has been done, we’re going to be more standoffish in our behaviors overall, and how we work and what we work on and with will simply have to adapt…as they are already adapting, and as we are adapting too.