Worries for a Post COVID-19 World
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It’s hard to imagine that the world will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic without undergoing significant changes, and given that it’s hard to focus on anything else at the moment, I thought I’d write about some of those potential changes, as a way of talking about the thing we’re all focused on, but in a manner that’s less obsessed with the minutiae of what’s happening right this minute.
To begin with there’s the issue of patience I mentioned in my last post. My first prediction is that special COVID-19 measures will still be in force two years from now, though not necessarily continuously. Meaning I’m not predicting that the current social distancing rules will still be in place two years from now, the prediction is more that two years from now you’ll still be able to read about an area that has reinstituted them after a local outbreak. Or to put it another way, COVID-19 will provoke significantly more worry than the flu even two years from now.
My next prediction is that some industries will never recover to their previous levels. In order of most damaged to least damaged these would be:
Commercial Realty: From where I sit this seems like the perfect storm for commercial realty. You’ve got a generalized downturn that’s affecting all businesses. Then you have the demise of WeWork (the largest office tenant in places like NYC) which was already in trouble and now has stopped paying many of it’s leases. But, on top of all of that you have numerous businesses who have just been forced into letting people work from home and some percentage of those individuals and companies are going to realize it works better and for less money. I’m predicting a greater than 20% decrease in the value of commercial real estate by the time it’s all over.
Movie theaters: I’m predicting 15% of movie theaters will never come back. More movies will have a digital only release, and such releases will get more marketing.
Cruises: The golden age of cruises is over. I’m predicting whatever the cruise industry made in 2019 that it will be a long time before we see that amount again. (I’m figuring around a decade.)
Conventions: I do think they will fully recover, but I predict that for the big conventions it will be 2023 before they regain their 2019 attendance numbers.
Sports: I’m not a huge sports fan, so I’m less confident about a specific prediction, but I am predicting that sports will look different in some significant way. For example lower attendance, drop in value of sports franchises, leagues which never recover, etc. At a minimum I’m predicting that IF the NFL season starts on time it will do it without people in attendance at the stadiums.
As you can tell most of these industries are ones that pack a large number of people together for a significant period of time, and regardless of whether I’m correct on every specific prediction, I see no way around the conclusion that large gatherings of people will be the last thing to return to a pre-pandemic normal.
One thing that would help speed up this return to normalcy is if there’s a push to eventually test everyone, which is another prediction I made a while back, though I think it was on Twitter. (I’m dipping my toe in that lake, but it’s definitely not my preferred medium, however if you want to follow me I’m @Jeremiah820) When I say test everyone, I’m not saying 100%, or even 95%, but I’m talking about mass testing, where we’re doing orders of magnitude more than we’re doing right now. Along the lines of what’s proposed in this Manhattan Program for Testing article.
Of course one problem with doing that is coming up with the necessary reagents, and while this prediction is somewhat at odds with the last prediction, it seems to be ever more clear that when it comes down to it, the pandemic is a logistical problem. And that long term harm is going to mostly come from the delay in getting or being able to produce what we need. For example the fact that our mask supply was outsourced to Southeast Asian, and most of our drug manufacturing has been outsourced to there and India, and most of our antibiotics are made in China and Lombardy Italy (yeah the area that was hit the hardest). The biggest problem with testing everyone appears to be getting the necessary reagents, I’m not sure where the bottleneck is there, but that’s obviously one of the biggest ones of all. In theory you should be seeing an exponential increase in the amount of testing similar to the exponential growth of the number of diagnosis (since ever diagnosis needs a test) but instead the testing statistics are pretty lumpy, and in my own state, after an initial surge the number of tests being done has slipped back to the level they were two weeks ago.
Thus far we mostly talked about the immediate impact of the pandemic with its associated lockdown, but I’m also very interested in what the world looks like after things have calmed down. (I hesitate to use the phrase “returned to normal” because it’s going to be a long time before that happens.) I already mentioned in my last post that I think this is going to have a significant impact on US-China relations, and in case it wasn’t clear I’m predicting that they’ll get worse. As to how exactly they will get worse, I predict that on the US side the narrative that it’s all China’s fault will become more and more entrenched, with greater calls to move manufacturing out of China, and more support for Trump’s tariffs. On the Chinese side, I expect they’re going to try and take advantage of the weakness (perceived or real, it’s hard to say) of the US and Europe to sew up their control of the South China Sea, and maybe make more significant moves towards re-incorporating Taiwan.
Turning to more domestic concerns, I expect that we’ll spend at least a little more money on preparedness, though it will still be entirely overwhelmed (by several orders of magnitude) by the money we’re spending trying to cure the problem after it’s happened rather than preventing it before it does. Also I fear that we’ll fall into the traditional trap where we’re well prepared for the last crisis, but then actually end up spending less money on other potential crises. As a concrete prediction I think the budget for the CDC will go up, but that budgets for things like nuclear non-proliferation and infrastructure hardening against EMPs, etc. will remain flat or actually go down.
Also on the domestic front, this is more of a hope than a prediction, but I would expect that there will be a push towards having more redundancy. That we will see greater domestic production of certain critical emergency supplies, perhaps tax credits for maintaining surge capacity (as I mentioned in a previous post), and possibly even an antitrust philosophy which is less about predatory monopolies, and more about making industries robust. That we will work to make things a little less efficient in exchange for making them less fragile
From here we move on to more fringe issues, though in spite of their fringe character these next couple of predictions are actually the ones I feel the most confident about. To start with I have some predictions to make concerning the types of conspiracy theories this crisis will spawn. Now obviously, because of the time in which we live, there are already a whole host of conspiracy theories about COVID-19. But my prediction is that when things finally calm down that there will be one theory in particular which will end up claiming the bulk of the attention. The theory that COVID-19 was a conspiracy to allow the government to significantly increase its power and in particular its ability to conduct surveillance. As far as specifics the number of people who currently identify as “truthers” (9/11 conspiracy theorists) currently stands at 20% I predict that the number of COVID conspiracy theorists will be at least 30%.
But civil libertarians are not the only ones who see more danger in the response to the pandemic than in the pandemic itself. I’m also noticing that a surprising number of Christians view it as a huge threat to religion as well. With many of them feeling that the declaration of churches as “non-essential” is very troubling just on it’s face, and that furthermore it’s a violation of the First Amendment. This mostly doesn’t include Mormons, and we were in fact one of the first denominations to shut everything down. But despite this I do have a certain amount of sympathy for the position, particularly if the worst accusations turn out to be true. Despite my sympathies I am in total agreement that megachurches should not continue conducting meetings, that in fact meetings in general over a few people are a bad idea. But consider this claim:
Christian churches worldwide have suffered the greatest, most catastrophic blow in their entire history, and - such is the feebleness of modern faith - have barely noticed (and barely even protested).
There are many enforced closures and lock-downs of many institutions and buildings in England now; but there are none, I think, so severe and so absolute as the lock-down of Church of England churches.
Take a look for yourself - browse around.
The instructions make clear that nobody should enter a church building, not even the vicar (even the church yard is supposed to be locked) - except in the case of some kind of material emergency like a gas leak. And, of course: all Christian activities must cease.
This is specifically directed at the church's Christian activities. As a telling example, a funeral can be conducted in secular buildings, but the use of church buildings for a religious funeral is explicitly forbidden.
Except, wait for it... Church buildings can be used for non-Christian activities - such as blood donation, food banks or as night shelters...
English churches are therefore - by official decree - now deconsecrated shells.
Church buildings are specifically closed for all religious activities - because these are allegedly too dangerous to allow; but at the same time churches are declared to be safe-enough, and allowed to remain open, for various 'essential' secular activities.
What could be clearer than that?
I’ve looked at the link, and the claims seem largely true, though sensationalized, and in some cases it looks like the things banned by the Church of England were banned by the state a few days later. But you can see where it might seem like churches are being especially singled out for additional restrictions. And, while I’m sympathetic. I do not think this means that there’s some sort of wide-ranging conspiracy. But this doesn’t mean that other people won’t, and conspiracy theories have been created from evidence more slender than this. (Also stuff like this PVP Comic doesn’t help.) Which leads to another prediction, the pandemic will worsen relations between Christians (especially evangelicals) and mainstream governmental agencies (the bureaucracy and more middle of the road candidates).
A metric for whether this comes to pass is somewhat difficult to specify, but insofar as Trump is seen as out of the mainstream, and as bucking consensus as far as the pandemic, one measure might be if his share of the evangelical vote goes up. Though I agree there could be lots of reasons for that. Which is to say I feel pretty confident in this prediction, but I wouldn’t blame you if you questioned whether I had given you enough for it to truly be graded.
Finally, in a frightening combination of fringe concerns, eschatology, things with low probability, and apocalyptic pandemics, we arrive at my last prediction. But first an observation, have you noticed how many stories there have been about the reduction in pollution and greenhouse gases as a result of the pandemic? If you have, does it give you any ideas? Was one of those ideas, “Man, if I was a radical environmentalist, I think I’d seriously consider engineering a pandemic just like this one as a way of saving the planet!”? No? Maybe it’s just me that had this idea, but let’s assume that in a world of seven billion people more than one person would have had this idea.
Certainly, even before the pandemic, there was a chance that someone would intentionally engineer a pandemic, and I don’t think I’m stretching things too much to imagine that a radical environmentalist might be the one inclined to do it, though you could also imagine someone from the voluntary human extinction movement deciding to start an involuntary human extinction movement via this method. My speculation would be that seeing COVID-19 with its associated effects on pollution and greenhouse gases has made this scenario more likely.
How likely? Still unlikely, but more likely than we’re probably comfortable with. A recent book by Toby Ord, titled The Precipice (which I have yet to read but plan to soon) is entirely devoted to existential risks. And Ord gives an engineered pandemic a 1 in 30 chance of wiping out all of humanity in the next 100 years. From this conclusion two questions follow, the first, closely related to my prediction: These odds were assigned before the pandemic, have they gone up since then? And the second question: if there’s a 1 in 30 chance of an engineered pandemic killing EVERYONE, what are the chances of a pandemic which is 10x worse than COVID-19, but doesn’t kill everyone. Less than 1 in 30 just by the nature of compound probability. But is it 1 in 10? 1 in 5?
My prediction doesn’t concern those odds. My prediction is about whether someone will make an attempt. This attempt might end up being stopped by the authorities, or it might be equivalent to the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo Subway, or it might be worse than COVID-19. My final prediction is that in the next 20 years there is a 20% chance that someone will attempt to engineer a disease with the intention of dramatically reducing the number of humans. Let’s hope that I’m mistaken.
For those who care about such things I would assign a confidence level of 75% for all of the other predictions except the two about conspiracy theories, my confidence level there is 90%. My confidence level that someone will become a donor based on this message is 10%, so less than the chances of an artificial plague, and once again, I hope I’m wrong.