There is no returning

9 min readApr 22, 2020

People are waiting for the day when they can all meet around coffee tables or bars and laugh about their funniest lockdown-memories. Some will talk about their funny conference apparel & some about how they played pranks. The only thing I have with this picture is how unlikely this is to happen. I don’t think the world is ever going to return to how it was in Nov 2019. I will wager that it is never going to return to a remote reflection of that state.

You are welcome to ignore this article as coming from a non-expert in the field of epidemiology or economics or sociology or systems or any field that counts for a topic like this. I, for one, believe that experts have their value but we don’t have to suspend our thinking because we aren’t them. What follows is an output of my meditation on the events that have unfolded in the past few months coupled with a study of the literature of this particular virus and epidemics in general, which lead to my giving this post this particular title. References are at the end:

Some facts (some fairly obvious) before we proceed:

This is not the first coronavirus disease. The history goes back to 1960s and before.
Animal coronaviruses are plenty. Human coronaviruses are fewer (as of today and what we know). We know very little about how they jump from animal to humans. We know a little about how they jump from human to human.
This virus seems to have hopped from animals to humans — zoonotic as they are called.
We had a SARS outbreak in 2002–2003. We had a MERS outbreak in 2012. The viruses that caused these are related to the virus that started COVID-19. It is 18 years since SARS & 8 years since MERS. We still do not have a vaccine for either. We still do not have a treatment for either. Think about it.
SARS-CoV-2 (the virus behind COVID-19) is a mutating virus. If the mutations are significant, vaccines would need constant updating. In other words, we might be chasing a moving target. Last time I checked, there are already 9–11 mutations of SARS-CoV-2 that are out there.
There are 500+ viruses belonging to the coronavirus family from bats alone. There are many many more from other rodents & animals. And this is merely just one family. Some say (with evidence) that there might be more than a million zoonotic viruses out there. This is based on a poorly funded, localised undertaking. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is actually several million.
This virus is designed for spreading. Be it in its R0 (R-nought/zero) or symptoms or its mortality rate, this one is designed to spread & remain.
As of today, numbers don’t seem to be reducing anywhere. We are 6 months in, since the first case.

Why do these matter? Here is why I think these are significant facts to consider. This virus spreads through “respiratory droplets” but also aerosols and surface contact. Aerosols make the 6-feet rule pointless. Surface contact eliminates the need of even having people around. You basically can’t touch anything (no holding on to, pushing/pulling bars, etc.) especially your face (which you supposedly touch several times in a day). You basically can’t traverse spaces where there have been others (because the aerosols suspended in air can contain the virus). Right now, we are doing all of that. Even those who stay indoors but are getting home delivery — if you aren’t wiping all surfaces clean before bringing in your parcel & then washing your hands, face & all items you have purchased. You don’t need to be paranoid. Or you could be paranoid. It doesn’t matter. There are simply way too many ways for the virus to spread. “At this point, I don’t think anyone can take a group of people with COVID, say how each person has become infected, and then say that xx% got infected with droplets and yy% got infected via touching surfaces,” says Dr. Jeffrey N. Martin, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Once the virus is in you, there is no way for you to even suspect its presence (unless you are getting tested every day). You, then, are ripe to infect others. For the next 24 days, at least. This is irrespective of whether you suffer or not. So you can go about infecting others for 24 days and then those infected folks can repeat that for another 24 days and so on. This is a significant problem. When will it stop infecting people? When can a city/state/country ever be sure that there isn’t a single person who can infect? It seems like this can go on till every single person is infected (with many dying). Our lockdowns are trying to prevent this from happening, which in some sense, means, there is always a potential of having someone who wasn’t ever infected or people who were infected and can still infect. When can people ever emerge from a lockdown?

All this makes sense (and becomes an acceptable loss to suffer in the coming months) only if immunity was a guarantee. We do not have that guarantee as of today. With everyone exploring a panviral medication strategy as well as counting on herd immunity, news from the ground about false positives and false negatives as well as relapses aren’t encouraging at all. The standard theory that antibodies will be produced as a response to an attack doesn’t seem to be true with many patients not showing the development of any antibodies. The doctors think we should thank their T-cells. Will they help the next time the native is exposed? No guarantees. Even in SARS & MERS, the antibodies seemed to be active for at most 1–3 years.

Which brings me to my main point of why we aren’t returning to normal — Human Greed. Whether it is for exotic wild animals or expanding cities into forestland or traveling all over the world or believing that the inanimate, non-human world is present merely to serve our purposes, our greed will keep exposing us to elements we have no means to confront. Add to this our commercial interests and financial greed. In the short-term interest of making money and feeding the capitalistic machinery, we will not invest in a global medical research+treatment+production capacity. We will not invest in a global food store for all the hungry people out there (irrespective of nationality). We will not do anything for the greater good. Now, add to this, our military ambitions which have led a bunch of idiots to develop viruses in situ. Idiotic countries like the USA, China, North Korea and many more will keep besting each other in building biologically catastrophic payloads. One small mistake in their security and we can have problems without a single bat, pangolin or pig involved.

Most of us probably know all of these. So what I fail to see or understand is how will anything return to normal any time soon or ever. Experts feel that even social distancing might continue till 2022. By then we would all probably get used to living like this. If we opened any time this year, we are going to risk way too many deaths, wave after wave. If that is the price we must pay, commercial pharmaceutical companies are not going to bother with developing medicines for something that will attain (hopefully) herd immunity (at the cost of tens of millions). But there will be more such epidemics & pandemics (even if only 0.001% of those zoonotic viruses turn out to be like SARS-CoV-2). Even if we reopened in Aug 2020, we simply can never return home without washing our hands, face and bodies vigourously. Travel is going to be on extremely pressing grounds. All congregations and crowds are going to be viewed at with suspicion and fear. Every minor pattern of illness is going to trigger fear and state-wide responses.

My friends keep asking me (and I wonder why) what I expect to be the trends in the coming days (and I keep correcting them — years). I am simply not an expert in predicting future trends and I have perhaps only had success in a few instances in the past. Nevertheless, there is no harm in extrapolating patterns one is seeing around. Here are some thoughts:

Remote execution is going to become default. Ordering & having it delivered. Working from home. Virtual meetings & conferences. Virtual book launches. Remote inspections. You name it. The assisting technologies will also see a rapid growth.
Supply-chains are going to move to a more local subsistence model. Even if not wholly local, I think redundancy with global supply-chains will be the norm. We can’t afford to be held ransom to any one country or region. This might trickle down further within a country (esp. geographically large countries). Imports and exports would also come under heavy health check regulations.
Migratory work might reduce as the toll is too high. Countries would need to factor this in as a strategy for growth. Reinvesting in existing hotspots might no longer be lucrative.
These might revive local industries and employment. This might also encourage self-sufficiency. Agriculture should get a boost.
In order to keep manufacturing alive (even if converted into manufacturing for essential supplies) lock-in zones would be a necessary investment by industries or the government. These would be sufficiently equipped buildings where the labour involved in manufacturing businesses can be housed, thereby isolating them (after sufficient testing) from the rest of the world and allowing manufacturing to continue. This might be necessary for vital services as well. Given that cities are filled, such infra would need to be in the hinterlands or even deeper. Which means rock solid infra needs to reach within the mainlands.
Communication infra has to become ubiquitous like air or clean water. Basic devices per home & multiple means to receive information have to be given to everyone. We cannot have people without access to information or necessary experiences during a lockdown.
Specialised pandemic infrastructure, perhaps like wartime bomb shelters, would be necessary in each country & major cities.
Countries need to mark themselves as adhering to the discipline of not encroaching on wildlife and with suitable distancing between wild and sterile spaces. Those who aren’t signatories will basically suffer from not having visitors to their country. Exotic experiences & indulgences will have to be curbed/disallowed. China’s ban on wildlife is probably mere lip-service.
Travel industry might no longer be an industry as it is. I think it will become a risk one must be willing to undertake, both for the individual as well as for the country allowing entry. Which might mean that the departing country (esp. if it is going to be countries like China, Thailand, etc.) would have to guarantee that the traveler is safe. This might imply contained health checks before departure or even limits in number of visitors from each country.
I could imagine a tax on traveling where a person who travels a lot progressively pays higher taxes for risking citizens.
That impacts tourism. That impacts the livelihood of all those who thrived on other people visiting and shopping in their country.
This brings us to virtual experiences. I feel that the tourism industry could thrive based on virtual & immersive experiences taken to the traveler. All featured storefronts and curators can be paid per view. A revenue model can definitely be designed to benefit everyone.
Education: I also feel, that with more and more virtual classes, schools might distinguish between necessary on-campus experiences and the rest. The latter, might be realised at home or in localised school-experience-kiosks. Perhaps a couple of streets or zipcodes/pincodes could erect a shared school-experience-kiosk where students in that locality (irrespective of which school they belong to) can use to gain from learning experiences which cannot be installed in homes. This restricts exposure & other risks. In-school experiences will be more consciously designed rather than mandating 7–10 hours in school. This would also open up a whole bunch of AI integration opportunities & security concerns but will also make it easy to recruit teachers across geographies as location would no longer be a problem.
With experiences & education becoming remotely served, AR/VR has a ripe market to capitalise on. Nearly all of what we need to do can be done via AR/VR which still has much scope of development and design.
Dialogue on “Enough” is bound to surface & begin to take main stage. Enough development. Enough progress. Enough purchasing power. Enough production. Enough population. etc. Designing for Enough is something that we will need in the job market.
Threshold consumption would be something we should all begin discussing. With good being viewed from the “essentials” lens, and the impact of hoarding clearly visible as in some countries, the dialogue around threshold consumption is vital & must be had.

Let’s wait and watch. These are, indeed, interesting times.

References:

There is no returning

Written by Anand Krishnaswamy

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