That the world will be different after the covid-19 pandemic is now something of a truism, though Prime Minister Imran Khan was not being defeatist when he said the disease was here to stay, but merely reflecting the latest received wisdom to come from the World Health Organization. The implications of that alone have perhaps not yet sunk in; but it means that the so-called emergency measures that are recommended, and which it was implied could be abandoned when the pandemic was over, will now have to be internalized, and made a permanent feature. This has major implications for life as it is lived.
The awkwardness to be seen in almost every home this Eid, as normally sure relatives fumbled about how to greet one another, and it became a problem for someone trying to practice social distancing to fend off a relative who stuck to the hoary tradition of the triple embrace. That awkwardness, that new social uncertainty, will merely add to the difficulties thrown up by urbanization. However, there are two ways in which being less expressive socially will change things. Work will change, moving more to the home, as will schooling.
The first issue that will arise will be that of connectivity. There is already sufficient connectivity for working or schooling at home to be a possibility, and for breakdowns to be a problem to be solved rather than some sort of insurmountable barrier. However, the Internet has moved from being a private convenience to a public good. It is not merely used to let a teenager play his favourite online game, but to let him get an education. Parents have thus developed an interest in connectivity. If they also work from home, they have an additional interest.
Working from home means that supervision becomes a problem. There is a sudden curtailing of the sort of interaction that both the supervisor and the supervised are used to, and until substitutes are developed, it becomes difficult to maintain the degree of supervision. There will now be a greater emphasis on output, as the concept of office discipline goes out the window. The worker may be as noisy or untidy as he or she likes; the supervisor will not care so long as he (or she) gets the job done on time. If supervision becomes a problem, then electing supervisors becomes all that much more a problem. The work has changed, the supervision has changed, what will become of the traditional organization?
This pandemic will leave effects. One is not supposed to eat watermelon and drink water because it could cause cholera. This is not a quaint custom, but a remnant of the precautions propagated during the cholera epidemics around World I. Just so, a century from now, some ‘quaint’ survival will remind our descendants of this pandemic.
While it might not be possible to predict anything, it should be noted that senior managers comprise the age group that is most at risk. So you will have a lot of frightened old men in decision-making positions. It should also be noted that a lot of positions might be under threat, of those who are not digitally as adept as they should be. There is a bottleneck here too, as the people making decisions about technical skills are themselves not as well adapted. When they themselves were recruited, digital skills, while no disadvantage, were not a prerequisite. That has changed.
Another change that has to take place is in the educational system. Not only must it shift online, but it must prepare students for the workplace in which they must earn a living. They have been designed to prepare them for offices and factories, not the fields, where so many of our people go, where so few Westerners go. The school of tomorrow must prepare the pupil for working from home. At the same time, he must also be ready for the factory, because goods will still have to be produced, and not all that much can be made at home. Even here, there will be some shifting, as workers start imagining their place of residence as a place of work.
While all these changes take place, commercial property can be expected to be something of a drug on the market. With office workers staying home, and using their residential space as work space, they will not need an office, which means their organization will not need to own or rent space for them. Not only will it become more difficult to rent or sell space in any new office buildings being built, but existing office buildings might see an exodus. Rented space may simply be abandoned, but owned buildings may make the organizations into the real estate business, as they try and find if remodeling for some other purpose, like residential use, works.
Business travel will go down, with consequences for both the travel and accommodation industries, with the latter providing a knock-on negative effect for the real estate business. One of the checks on travel will be the inoculation requirement for international travel, once a vaccine is developed. Apart from getting the vaccine, there will be the inconvenience of keeping, in addition to one’s passport, the booklet certifying that the vaccine had been administered. The anti-covid-19 vaccine will be required for entry to certain countries. No prizes for guessing that this will help constitute a form of discrimination against Third-World citizens.
However, it is not just the school and workplace, but whenever anyone leaves the home. For example, entertainment will change. Sports events, concerts, cinemas, theatres, will all be changed forever, even if they do resume or re-open. One can expect more of the sort of outcry at British PM’s Adviser Dominic Cummings, who faced calls for resignation because he travelled to visit his parents in Durham. An apparently filial gesture is being condemned for violating social distancing. One implication is that illicit liaisons will be rendered that much more awkward, while courtship and marriage, already hard enough, will become even more so.
The Western idea of having fun, which just means some way of getting blind drunk without drinking alone, will have to be abandoned. The idea of a crowded, smoke-filled bar with people cavorting to loud music is enough to give a public health official a heart attack, even without factoring in the physical contact involved in most dance-floor encounters. There will be a reinforcement of the taboos about using needles and razors. In fact, all the taboos surrounding AIDS will be reinforced, because this too is a viral disease with parallels in both transmission and treatment.
There should be a campaign against the virus to be expected, much as the anti-malaria and anti-smallpox campaigns of yore, followed by the anti-dengue and anti-polio campaigns of more recent times. It is possible that the virus might be wiped out, but the reality is that this virus has managed to cross over from the animal it originally infected to humans.
However, it should not be presumed to be the last such pandemic, the last virus that will attempt a crossover. One of the factors emerging has been the natural fear of death, and how Mankind has been taught that Man does not yet control Nature.
This pandemic will leave effects. One is not supposed to eat watermelon and drink water because it could cause cholera. This is not a quaint custom, but a remnant of the precautions propagated during the cholera epidemics around World I. Just so, a century from now, some ‘quaint’ survival will remind our descendants of this pandemic.
Great