Long term, part1

There could be some interesting long term impacts of the current pandemic, indeed there should definitely be some long term impacts, whether there actually will be any changes is a matter that will be debated long and hard over the coming years.

One thing that will influence any changes will be money and commerce, as they have done ever since the creation of money or the agricultural revolution. And there will no doubt be some mention of peak-end theory whereby we, as human beings, have a recollection of an experience that tends towards recollection of the end of the experience and of selected peaks and troughs in the middle of the experience and very little recollection of the beginning of the experience. So when, one day, the end of, for instance, the lockdown comes, our recollection of it will tend to be of the end of that period of time. And, as more time passes, less and less will be recollected of any detail of the period, just of the final days. Plus, it is possible, as with many things, that we will have grown to accept the lockdown and how we feel about it, we will have adapted to it and developed routines and mechanisms to cope. Mainly because we do this all the time anyway. So, unlikely as it seems during the lockdown, the recollection of it once it is over is unlikely to be one of great suffering.

I suspect that once the lockdown in ay particular area or country is achieved there will be a mass outgoing and people will flock to places they have missed or places that they have never been to but have thought about how they should have gone to those places before they were unable to do so. And this too, shall pass. Soon, remarkably quickly I suspect, life will return to normality. Things will settle back into a rhythm and those other places you really wanted to go and visit will remain unvisited until the next time you are deprived of your freedom and then make plans to go see them after that lockdown.

I can't help feeling that there will be some long term changes though. Perhaps there are things that people are doing whilst in lockdown that they had not done a great deal of previously, perhaps it is cooking or reading or playing video games. Or perhaps it is conversation or education or diy or gardening. Perhaps there are lots of things that individuals are doing now that they could not do previously, or rather did not find the time to do but now have the time forced upon them and so start to do, that they find they enjoy, they find therapeutic so much so that after the lockdown ends they continue with these things and try to find the time to continue doing them even after they are no longer doing them just to relieve boredom. Perhaps. It will, along with so many other things be the subject of countless studies.

One, of several, big question is whether the world will learn and in particular whether the governments of the world, especially the larger decision making governments, weigh up the pros and cons of actually putting greater funding into organisations such as the UN and, in particular, the WHO which is an agency of the UN and whether these governments will stop continually fighting against these organisations and start working with them for the greater benefit of all mankind. It would be nice to think this would be the case by I'm afraid I am cynical about such things. Already we have seen one world leader, albeit the term has lost the shine it once had, threaten to cut funding for WHO at a time when funding should be increased. 

Surely, from a purely economical perspective the incredible multi trillion dollar impact the world is seeing and will continue to see over the coming years will be reason enough to put in place, or in the case of WHO support further, mechanisms to identify future threats and to have in place mechanisms to stop or as a minimum delay, future such pandemics. In economics there are even calculations for such things including calculations on the value of an individual life weighted with various averages such as life expectancy and physical condition. I would guess that even from an economics perspective it makes sense to pay for this kind of insurance. However, just as individuals suffer from peak-end theory, so it seems do governments albeit possibly in a more cynical way.

One thing governments will take into account when the post-pandemic period arrives is what are the chances of another virus appearing that would cause a similar crisis. I suspect they will look for the answer that suggests the next occurence will be a long way off and/or will not be as serious. 

Such thinking is exactly why we are where we are because although lots of people like to point at the influenza pandemic of 1918 as being the last time what they should be doing is considering the outbreaks of SARS, MERS, Ebola and even AIDS. Which I think you will agree are far more recent. 

The likelihood of another virus, or at least another mutation of Covid-19 or variation of coronavirus, is really rather likely. It is likely because that's what viruses do. They don't think about it because they are not sentient beings carefully thinking up new plans for world domination. But what they do do is copy themselves over and over again as they find each new host. This replication process often causes small changes in the virus DNA. If the change in the DNA causes the virus to become less effective then that mutation will cease to infect people but some mutations will become even more effective and will become a new variant which will get a new name at some point in time. On the plus side the virus mutations that kill more people tend also not to survive so long as they tend to destroy what they need to survive, generally that's us!

So this will not be the last such event and governments will be well advised to fund mechanisms to identify and manage all future events. I would suggest that increasing the funding and support of WHO would be a good starting point. We will have to wait and see.