Taking a Glimpse at The Post-Covid World

Like most people, over the past 2–3 months I have spent an unhealthy amount of time incessantly checking for Coronavirus updates, reading opinion pieces and going down Twitter rabbit holes trying to make sense of the new world we now live in. As things started to settle into the new normal of social distancing and self-isolation, I shifted from thinking about the immediate to thinking about the future and was trying to answer one question. What are the the new trends and lasting tailwinds that will shape our future in the wake of this pandemic?

Throughout my sporadic research and conversations with friends I started to put together a list of ideas of what is to come. I finally got around to cleaning up the list and segmenting them into Health, Economic, Social and Political outcomes and making it available here. The ideas below are in no way an exhaustive list or even correct for that matter.

They are merely a collection of ideas I have come across and hypothesized myself, and can serve as a starting point for anyone trying to get a glimpse of what a post-pandemic world may look like. Some ideas will be obvious and some are 2nd and 3rd order effects that are a little less so. If you disagree with any or have any to add to the list drop a comment and let’s evolve this list together.

Health trends

1. Governments to set up a more advanced systematic population wide health data collection infrastructure for epidemic and virus tracking. The goal is to create high velocity data pipelines that give recent, accurate and a voluminous amount of data that can help detect and predict the rise of new infections/pathogens as early as possible. They will potentially track data through toilet bowls, entrance of work buildings, facial recognition, thermal scanners, sewage systems, search terms, credit card data, networked home devices etc. All centralized in one place, collecting data in real time and raising red flags when markers go above normal. The advent of a big brother-esque public health system.
2. Digital contact tracing done through apps that tell you when you have been around someone that tested positive. Can be done via bluetooth, GPS, or cell tower location data. Many forms of this are already in the works with some being done in a centralized way by governments and others in a more privacy-first decentralized approach such as with the Apple/Google partnership. Either way this will all lead to a relative erosion of privacy and open doors for the encroachment of a surveillance state. People will accept loss of privacy as the lesser of evils and learn to live with it.
3. Hygiene best practices we have learned to adopt are here to stay. This means the habits of excessive hand washing, masks in public, no handshakes, no cheek kissing, no hugs will continue to be the norm for the foreseeable future.Hygiene tech will takeoff. Lots public surfaces that we typically touch will be transformed to touch-less versions. This means another wave of huge adoption of touch-less sensor technology to help us open doors, press elevator buttons, turn on lights, and much more. Self-cleansing machines will become the new metal detector where some kind of machine will be used at the entrance of major public buildings to sanitize humans.
4. Restaurants and cinemas to have lower capacity numbers with minimum distances having to be enforced between tables/people. This makes these businesses models less economically viable and will hurt the industry. Restaurants to adapt by shifting their models towards setting up more ghost kitchens and doing delivery while movie studios will have to experiment more with releasing movies straight to streaming.
5. The oximeter, which helps measure oxygen levels in the body, will become as common as a thermometer in the home first aid kit. For the uninitiated, this little device has become a must own gadget for helping one catch themselves early in detecting low oxygen levels, giving you a better chance of recovery with an earlier trip to the hospital.
6. Quick result test kits that tell you whether you have the virus within 15 minutes may become a commonplace procedural item in airports and public gatherings. This might create too big of a bottleneck in processing people in public spaces and might not be viable unless an even faster type of test is designed (like a pregnancy pee on a stick test).
7. Alternatively, immunity passports are more likely to become the de facto item that would dictate your ability to enter a public space. They will likely coupled together with contact tracing apps. They would be more practical than a rapid test at the door, but less effective as there would always be a significant lag since the last time you or someone you got in touch with had a test and gave your ID a chance to update. For the ones based on anti-body tests, they could also prove unreliable as both the tests themselves are unreliable and we are still not sure if reinfection is possible.
8. Telemedicine has seen decades worth of adoption happen in a matter of weeks and the trend will continue to grow. More mobile and on demand health services will follow suit as people are less willing to visit hospitals for check ups for fear of needless exposure to pathogens.
9. More robust pandemic plans will be put in place to insure agile and expandable capacity of hospital beds, doctors, health equipment, and testing. We will be much more prepared for the next pandemic and in some ways this was an invaluable “dry run” for the inevitable rise of a disease that has much high mortality rates.

Economic (and business) trends

1. Companies will become more conservative and optimize their balance sheets for resiliency by holding bigger cash buffers. This means less money for dividends, R&D, and growth. This “inefficient” financial structure will mean less jobs, worse stock performance, lower GDP, and an increase in demand for safe short term investment vehicles to park the cash in (short term treasuries, GICs etc).
2. Companies will also restructure their operations for resiliency to decrease risk of an international crisis disrupting their business. This means shortening their supply chains and trying to bring manufacturing and sourcing as close to home as possible. A broad movement away from Just In Time to Just In Case inventory management.
3. There will be a boom in local manufacturing for food and other essentials such as energy, water, and health equipment as insuring those supply chains will be seen as a national security issue. This movement towards local supply chains spurs the anti-globalization narrative and supports nationalization.
4. Moving away from the global free trade model of specialize and trade (for essential goods at least) will make goods more expensive as there is an anti-specialization of sorts and countries trying to recreate the same essential industries locally with varying degrees of efficiency. Countries that were net importers of essential goods will see job growth with the boom in local production.
5. These trends of anti-globalization will put even more pressure on energy independence giving more support to initiating solar and nuclear energy projects but also putting more pressure on oil drilling.
6. Unlimited quantitative easing by the Fed could lead to fear of inflation in the dollar and a rise in demand of anti-inflationary assets that have a constricted supply like Gold and Bitcoin.
7. People turn to more jobs they can do online and remotely. A wave of new digital workers to come online such as developers, digital marketers, content creators, online therapists, online coaches etc.
8. People broke the barrier with video conferencing and it will turn to a new habit with a lot more meetings happening online instead of in person. Less need for business travel and offices.
9. The grand working remotely experiment will have garnered a lot of new fans, and now that companies were forced to develop remote capabilities they will hire and allow for a lot more remote workers as a part of their teams. This will lead to greater competition in the job market and downward pressure on salaries as candidate supply pool becomes global. This will also lead to a de-urbanization trend with a lot of people able to live outside main cities where the rent is cheaper and they get more space. This in turn will lead to a growth in suburban towns and all the businesses that support them.
10. Employees to work rotating shifts at offices and have staggered start and end times to minimize interaction in the office and at rush hours.Continued rise of e-learning as some workers forced to retrain themselves for new careers in the wake of pandemic layoffs. Inclination to stay home also means people have more time to learn and take online courses. Students who experimented with learning online and seeing how much cheaper and accessible it is may decide to skip hefty university fees and keep their education online. Universities main selling point is now helping students create a network.
11. Continued rise in e-commerce and fall of physical retail as people avoid crowded places when they can. This will drive a continued rise in delivery services for restaurants, retail, and groceries.
12. The stock market is losing credibility as an efficient mechanism for pricing things accurately. Unlimited QE by the fed and bailouts by the governments are artificially inflating the price of public market assets. This will continue to encourage risky behaviour by big companies as they know they will be bailed out if necessary. Main Street continues to pay for Wall Streets foibles as ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ crony capitalism lives on.

Social trends

1. A rise in the doomsday market where the super-rich will look to buy luxury remote bunkers they can quarantine in for the next crisis. Many already fled to bunkers in New Zealand this time around, next time there will be even more. Maybe the market will start growing downstream and cater to the more mildy rich with some lower end bunkers in remote areas within their home countries.
2. Continued popularity of home gyms and home exercise solutions. Where people can avoid crowded spaces they will. New Peloton and Mirror style home exercise experiences will continue to come out. The advent of VR/AR will take this to the next level.
3. VR could have its moment, allowing people to socialize online in a whole new way. VR can also be used to help bring back mass live events (sports, concerts etc.) in a social distancing friendly way.
4. People to continue to get more hooked on social media as a means for staying in touch with others and socializing, as engagement on major platforms has increased as much as 61% in some cases.
5. Dating trends to shift from dinner and a movie to more outdoorsy activities away from crowds and closed spaces. Drive in-theatres make a comeback?

Political trends

1. US moving away from being the world leader. They proved themselves inept in handling the crisis and took a back seat in coordinating any international response. China showed the weaknesses of its authoritarian regime where information is constrained and proved itself untrustworthy to the international community with their lack of transparency about the crisis. The world looked more towards countries like South Korea and Germany for leadership on how to manage the pandemic. G7 meeting was called by France and G20 by Saudi Arabia to help countries coordinate, not by the US or China.
2. This speeds up the general trend of the transition to the “Post-American World” (as framed by Fareed Zakaria) where the world is somewhat rudderless without any one power leading the way and setting the agenda of what we are moving towards. The trend of nationalism will hasten and instead countries will look to act more independently and opportunistically.
3. Continued popularity of populist movements and their anti-immigration and protectionist policies (Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK etc.) as anti-globalization trends spur on in the wake of the crises.
4. The significant positive difference the lockdown has made on the environment will embolden green policy activists to push for more drastic policies to control global warming. This has been a great experiment that can give us a concrete data point on how effective large scale emergency measures may be in controlling a more acute future global warming crisis.

Let me know below if you disagree with any of the above or you have any other ideas that I missed.

Previously published at https://medium.com/@fileundermisc/trends-for-the-new-normal-a258e9c9eadc