Article by Richard Fernandez in "PJMedia":
Even though the Covid-19 infection is still on the rise in much of the world there is some hope it can be slowed down to where it can be managed as a chronic public health problem.
The ideal goal in fighting an epidemic or pandemic is to completely halt the spread. But merely slowing it — mitigation — is critical. This reduces the number of cases that are active at any given time, which in turn gives doctors, hospitals, police, schools and vaccine-manufacturers time to prepare and respond, without becoming overwhelmed. Most hospitals can function with 10 percent reduction in staff, but not with half their people out at once.
Should it
ever settle down, the lasting impact of Covid-19 will probably be
cultural. Physically the pandemic has seemingly left the world's
infrastructure untouched. The accumulated deaths, while tragic, appear
thankfully few compared to war. What obviously died was the confidence
of the End of History.
What Covid-19 ended was the illusion of control. Before the virus,
world leaders had big plans for the future. Now they will be happy to
survive the present.
As with every crisis, there will probably be some winners. Telecommuting, online learning, delivery services, cleaning gangs, failover suppliers, etc., may see an uptick. The New York Times:
The global spread of the coronavirus is reigniting efforts by the Trump administration to encourage more American manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and reduce dependence on China for the drugs and medical products that fuel the federal health care system. ...The administration has been preparing an executive order, which could be released in the coming days, that would close loopholes allowing the government to purchase pharmaceuticals, face masks, ventilators and other medical products from foreign countries. The hope is that increasing government demand for American-made drugs and medical products will provide an incentive for companies to make their products in the United States, rather than China.To help facilitate such production, the White House is also pushing for streamlined regulatory approvals for American-made products and more detailed labeling of the origin of products made offshore, these people said.
One of the losers
may be the idea of globalization. "Well before a deadly virus began
spreading across multiple borders, a world defined by deepening
interconnection appeared to be reassessing the merits of globalization,"
wrote Peter Goodman of the NYT.
The United States, led by the unabashed nationalist Donald J. Trump, was ordering multinational companies to abandon China and make their goods in American factories. Britain was forsaking the European Union ...A surge of refugees fleeing some of the most dangerous places on earth — Syria, Afghanistan, Central America — had produced a backlash against immigration in many developed countries. ...
"The
coronavirus that has seeped out of China, insinuating itself into at
least 81 countries while killing more than 3,200 people" may prove the
death blow to a lot of political projects. "It has sown chaos in the
global supply chain that links factories across borders and oceans." The
public is discovering that a lot of mid-20th-century progressive social
engineering -- communal kitchens, high-density housing, public
transportation, daycare -- is surprisingly dangerous in a truly
connected world. As a result of recent reversals, Bernie Sanders may be
walking into what the NYT calls the "Open Borders Trap":
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vows a moratorium on deportations and a move to “break up” ICE. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts joined him in pledging to make border crossings a civil, not criminal offense, before leaving the race this week. Both would include undocumented migrants in their plans for universal health insurance (as did the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., Pete Buttigieg, a moderate who also left the race recently).
What was only recently a promise is now a threat.
But
although the physical and human damage to the world may seem at any
instant slight, it is unremitting. The disruption could grind on, like
the trench warfare of the Great War, without an obvious end and
cumulatively produce changes that go far beyond their immediate effect.
The hopeful assumption that the ordeal will soon be over may prove as
illusory as the 1914 generation's belief they would be "home before the
leaves fall."
The
echoes of Covid-19 may reverberate for a long time. Epidemics, like the
waves of the sea, can come in succession. Research suggests that
epidemic waves could be a periodic function of social networks themselves. The global world has become tuned to certain reverberations and nature is ringing it like a wind chime.
Epidemics of infectious diseases are frequently characterized by multiple waves of infection. Notably, the 1918 influenza pandemic spread through several US and European cities in multiple waves with local variation in the frequency and timing of individual epidemic peaks ...Community structure—aggregation into highly intraconnected but loosely interconnected groups—is a common feature of social contact networks that can potentially drive multiwave epidemics as a disease spreads through one group before emerging in another. ...Our results suggest that ordinary contact patterns can produce multiwave epidemics at the scale of a single urban area without the temporal shifts that are usually assumed to be responsible. Understanding the role of community structure in epidemic dynamics allows officials to anticipate epidemic resurgence without having to forecast future changes in hosts, pathogens, or the environment.
Instead of a
rapid return to normalcy societies may experience a long period of
adjustment in social distance norms, travel regulations, supply chain
arrangements, personal privacy, and political norms. These will
effectively produce a whole new world. The old global system may be in
for a long siege and it is unclear that it will ever be the same again.