The pandemic is getting a lot worse, and fast. As “president” Trump continues to argue uselessly with experts while Americans die in their tens of thousands, a simple, but permanent fact is emerging. The whole socioeconomic house of cards has fallen down.
Businesses dragged screaming into better environments
The pandemic has pushed corporate America and the rest of the world into a new way of living. There’s no “immunity” to viruses which change endlessly with every generation they produce. People aren’t “immune” to the flu, for example. There’s an annual vaccine, and no more than that. COVID-19 is likely to be much the same. That is, until someone gets off their butts and funds virology properly.
The new lifestyle, if you can call it that, is based largely on doubt. The new workplace is home. It’s cheaper and simpler for everyone, but the dumbest of the dumb haven’t realized that yet. Digital business is quicker, faster, far cheaper, and much more economic. It’s either do business the right way, or a permanent recession.
Where will all the no-brained executives go? What about all those exciting eunuch conventions called office meetings? Oh, the horror of it all.
Everyone’s known that for decades, but the suits still whine for staggeringly expensive offices. They seem to thrive in places full of people in often very strange, hostile, truly antisocial environments. A rising generation which grew up with COVID-19 will wonder why anyone ever bothered doing business like that. There won’t be any credible answers from history, either.
Lifestyle is finding its way through the ruins
Big crowds are a thing of the past. Big crowds are also often dangerous, and they can spread other diseases pretty efficiently, too. The joke is that most people don’t like big crowds, for those and many other reasons.
“Big crowds” also extend to overcrowded living environments which are disease incubators on a massive scale. These big ratholes have always been unsanitary, and usually a sign of extreme poverty. Now, living in a decent environment without a few thousand other people mere feet away is looking like a very good alternative.
Behaviours are changing, too. The theory of “quarantine pods”, where you only socialize with a few people or families, is taking root, to a point. That will extend to friends, family, etc. over time, but on a more managed basis. What’s wrong with just socializing with the people you like, anyway?
(It’ll be interesting to see how the red carpet crowd deal with it. The old trashy socialite slum scenes are no great loss, but they’ll have to be replaced with something. Perhaps all these celebrities would like to form socially distanced queues?)
Politics – The times are a-long overdue for changing
The politics are also changing, very reluctantly. Total failure isn’t too popular with the public. So much total failure in one time and space by so many so-called leaders is the certain death knell for politics which traditionally refuse to address human need on any level.
The pandemic has proven that people who do nothing about poverty, education, welfare, health, housing or anything else are equally useless in life-or-death situations. This pandemic is a road map for future generations in how NOT to manage everything.
This is global. The United States and United Kingdom aren’t the only nations looking down the barrel of a very uncertain future. Nobody knows if China has actually contained the disease as it said. That’s mainly because all other news coming out of China is to put it mildly ultra-obnoxious on multiple levels. The silence on the subject is deafening while China accuses just about everyone of anything and everything on any other subject but the pandemic.
India is fighting its war of desperation against a huge population and strained resources. Brazil isn’t doing at all well, and the nation’s leader has the disease himself. Nobody seems to know what’s happening in Africa, since day one. The Russian Federation isn’t having much fun, either, but what the hey – Siberia’s on fire, too, and that’s not getting much local commentary.
You can see why the current political situation can’t survive. The payback will be brutal and very apt. People who’ve lost friends and family don’t like knowing those deaths were preventable. Unimpressed voters looking at months of nothing but disinformation don’t have to vote for the sources of disinformation, either.
The thoroughly deserved end of anti-science
Some very good news on this front – The only thing that can get the world out of this mess is science. Being anti-science means being anti-solutions. How a guy who supposedly paid someone else to get his high school diploma can even claim to argue with experts is debatable. The fact is that he can’t. The fool who called the pandemic a hoax can’t now claim to be a saviour.
In the UK, the “we don’t want experts” mantra (courtesy the unspeakable Michael Gove) has resulted in the worst death rate in the English-speaking world. 14% in the UK vs an average of about 3% elsewhere, or much less. Again, anti-science has failed monumentally, at the expense of 44,915 lives officially, and allegedly far more.
Anti-science was the idiot thinking behind the reopening blunders as well as failure to be ready for the big hit from the pandemic. Not only did the fools believe their own disinformation, they acted on it. Reopening has caused spikes in infection rates everywhere it has happened. The reopening mantra didn’t even begin to comprehend the problem, or how widely and easily the disease transmits.
Anti-science can’t handle any of the new problems with the virus, either. Serious issues including infant Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, PTSD and major trauma in ICU patients. There are also some weird secondary conditions emerging in supposedly recovered COVID-19 patients, including vision loss, hearing loss, etc. There is no way a herd of proven ignoramuses can manage any of these issues. Only science can solve these problems.
Ironically, the pandemic may be ridding the world of some of its worst problems, and serial offenders against human betterment. The regressive mindsets can’t cope with the virus on any level. These lazy minds and their centuries-old clichés are truly obsolete and long overdue for the scrapheap. The virus is simply proving that point.
So don’t despair too much for the future. Things can get better pretty simply. Doing things properly will fix most of the issues. It’s just a matter of facing reality.
