[ohithereyou]

If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then there is going to be a transformational change in how US citizens think about work, travel, entertainment, security, and the relationship between US citizens and their government. All of these aspects are intertwined:

Work: More people will work more time from home and many firms will switch to virtually full time remote with limited physical gathering. This will decrease the cost of office rents and alter the work/life balance. It will affect wages because people can live outside of city centers and still work so companies will pay less. We may be on the cusp of US government guaranteed sick leave.

Travel: People will, for the short term, do less travel for pleasure, but the big impact, long term, business trips will decrease. More and more business meetings will be replaced with voice and video conferencing. There was no big driver other than some cost reduction here, but now safety and security will be the big drivers here. Global pandemic concerns (prevention, containment) will complicate travel to varying degrees, and in a way that most US citizens aren't used to - it will affect interstate travel, not just trans-national travel.

Entertainment: Many of the sports that have been deferred or canceled will likely be replaced with other forms of entertainment that can be viewed on television or the Internet. Fewer people will go to live performances, both because they can't (cancelled by the government) and reluctant to after COVID clears. This will affect service workers - where most of the lesser skilled jobs have been created in the last three decades.

Security: Security will no longer be seen as just a physical access control concern. Business has been preparing over the last two decades for the eventuality of global pandemic - now they can put those plans into action, and the impacts of them will cascade into personal lives. US citizens will be demanding more from their government in disaster preparedness on pandemics - it will affect travel.

All of these tie into how US citizens see their relationship with their government, and what they demand from it.

[smacktoward]

> Entertainment: Many of the sports that have been deferred or canceled will likely be replaced with other forms of entertainment that can be viewed on television or the Internet. Fewer people will go to live performances, both because they can't (cancelled by the government) and reluctant to after COVID clears.

My guess is that you're overstating the long-term effect on this front. People like leaving the house; people like gathering with other people; people have liked these things for as long as there have been people. They're not going to stop liking them because they've been stuck alone indoors for a couple of months. Enforced abstinence for a while may even increase demand for social entertainment, once the dust settles -- "you don't know what you've got until it's gone," etc.

[Apocryphon]

Not to mention, people can still go to low-density venues outside. I wonder if both neighborhood parks and county/state/national parks will experience higher rates of attendance.

[zaroth]

I understand everything that you wrote is just speculation starting from the conditional, “If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then...” but I just don’t follow the logic.

It’s not our first pandemic. It won’t be the last. And I don’t see any reason at all to think why people won’t go back to living their lives at the first possible opportunity.

But what does “dig in deep” even mean? In the vast majority of cases it’s a mild virus with symptoms generally lasting a week.

If anything I think at the end of all this people will be deeply suspicious the next time the WHO declares a pandemic and insists we need to shut down the world economy.

We are not dealing with an exponential function. We are dealing with a logistics function, I.e. an “S” curve.

The predominant factor to coming out the other side of the curve is herd immunity.

IMO, the faster that young and middle age people acquire herd immunity, the safer it is long term for the elderly who are at the highest risk, because it drives R0 below 1 and extinguishes the pandemic.

The flaw with “flatten the curve” is overly simplistic thinking around the severity of cases. The best way to eliminate severe cases, assuming strict containment is impossible or cripplingly costly, is to gain herd immunity in the low-risk populations.

[majos]

> It’s not our first pandemic. It won’t be the last.

As far as I can tell, for almost all Americans, this is our first pandemic. The closest analogue might be polio in the 1950s, but maybe 10% of the population remembers that.

Going down the list, none of the remaining pandemics within living memory seem to have made a large impact on life in the US [1].

It’s not crazy to imagine changes from this event. There doesn’t seem to be much precedent here for it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

[grecy]

> If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then there is going to be a transformational change in how US citizens think ...... All of these tie into how US citizens see their relationship with their government, and what they demand from it.

I certainly hope you are right, but unfortunately I suspect the companies making billions of dollars will do absolutely everything in their power to make sure those changes don't happen.

Because there is so much money tied up in the current way things are done Americans have decades of fighting the power structure before they can expect to change their relationship with their government. If only they knew what Europeans get for their tax dollars.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "If COVID-19 digs in deep in the US then there is going to be a transformational change in how US citizens think about work, travel, entertainment, security, and the relationship between US citizens and their government."

Even the Spanish Flu didn't manage to do that and the actual death toll was even higher than the projections from COVID-19.

[lukifer]

Instantaneous worldwide communication is arguably a game-changer. And while it's easy to be pessimistic about the state of science education, the ability and motivation to self-educate may have some impact on national and global consciousness. Neither of these things were even slightly possible 100 years ago.

[throw51319]

I don't see how it will make long lasting changes other than your first point about WFH and virtual meetings being even more normalized.

Travel and entertainment, doing these in-person is interwoven in our DNA. These industries (lol at how Trump says this word) are gonna take a huge hit, but will of course rebound.

I do think people will be more hygenic for many years to come because of this.