Sunday Times 2
Life in post-corona world
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In last month’s column I described how I was enjoying my case of Corona – not, I hasten to add, the coronavirus but rather the gift I had received of Mexican beer.
Sadly for me my case of Corona, enjoyable as it was, finished a long time ago, but sadly for all of us the virus that causes Covid-19 is still alive and well — and continuing to disrupt the health and economy of our land.
As I sit at home in curfew-enforced isolation, I muse as to what sort of world we will face (assuming of course that I live to tell the tale) when this pandemic, as it surely must, comes under control.
We human beings are for the most part creatures of habit. We do what we do, whether it is working, eating, communicating or whatever, because we have got used to that way of doing things and it has worked alright for us up to now. As we say in Sinhalese, these “gathaanugathika” methods have been working for us all this time — so why should we change?
But, sometimes, change is forced on us by a drastic shock to our systems as this Covid-19 pandemic has done. Many of us have learned to work from home – and some of us are finding that with this greater flexibility, we are much happier without our daily commute to work. Our ‘work from home’ output is probably proving to be not that much different to our ‘work in office’ output!
We are realising that it is not necessarily to make a trip to meet someone to get something done – our purpose can be achieved just as well with a timely phone call or email. Even meetings, boring as they might be, can be done quite well using computers and video cameras.
Once the companies that provide services like online ordering and delivery get their acts together and improve their systems, we will find it convenient ordering things to be delivered rather than making a trip to the shop or supermarket. The banks will get us used to using credit and debit cards rather than carrying cash – and of course they will make a little bit of money from each online transaction and from credit card debt!
Consumers and workers, shops and businesses that get used to a new way of doing things will find that they prefer this new way – and the businesses that survive the pandemic will have to change to provide these facilities and services. Businesses that are slow to change the way they interact with customers and suppliers will find themselves being left behind.
Once the situation normalises, the new habits that have been forced on us will remain. Our windows to the world will have become our computers and our smart phones. Will printed newspapers and magazines survive this paradigm shift? As a journalist I certainly hope they will!
Just as war drives the need for change and hastens the utilisation of new weapons, inventions and systems, so too will this pandemic get us using new technologies. Remote work technology will improve and e-commerce companies will profit. Teaching, especially university teaching, will increasingly be done online as academics learn new programmes like Zoom, Zoho and Skype and familiarise themselves with giving lectures and doing tutorials online. This may also allow more students to have access to the best teachers, and may even reduce the cost of higher education as society questions the value of funding residential students at higher educational facilities.
Healthcare provision will change as telemedicine becomes more common and the technology improves. Why travel to the channeled consultation clinics at the crowded private hospitals and sit for hours waiting for the tardy doctor when you can comfortably sit in your own home, wait for the phone call – and discuss your ailments with the doctor, with or without a video camera? Whether this method of accessing healthcare is good or bad remains to be seen. While we in the 21st century have come to look on Medicine as an Art based on Science, where we value kindness, empathy and a nice bedside manner in our doctor, perhaps in the future medical diagnosis and management will be based on patients ticking boxes in a questionnaire that is then assessed by a computer or robot!
Businesses that cater to travel – airlines, hotels and tourism – will suffer and it may take a long while before they can return to doing as well as they were doing. Organised religion too has taken a major hit with religious gatherings having been proved to have facilitated the spread of the deadly virus — with churches, mosques, synagogues and temples having to remain closed to worshippers.
In our own country, as in places like Singapore and South Korea, we have seen how decisive leadership backed by an authoritarian technocratic government has helped to minimise the impact of COVID-19, while slow-moving Western democracies as in the US, Britain and Italy have suffered greatly. Perhaps we Sri Lankans will question the value of having 225 highly paid legislators, elected and maintained at great cost to the country. These politicians have for the most part have been conspicuous by their absence — while the country is being efficaciously managed by a decisive president backed by proper advisors and a disciplined defence force. Will the people prefer to give up the right to protest in exchange for security from disease?
It will be interesting to be around in a post-corona world.
I certainly hope I will make it!