The Pandemic Will Have Long-Term Impacts

I don't think there's anyone reading who isn't looking forward to the end of the pandemic. I know I am. But even if the pandemic subsides, and likely becomes just another endemic disease we have to worry about occasionally, it is going to have long-term impacts. These impacts will last for years and possibly decades, as this article from Talking Points Memo suggests. 

 These all suggest that the impact of the COVID Pandemic will not only be long-lasting but likely show most in ways now only barely visible to us. The so-called ‘great resignation’ is a key example. There are all sorts of theories about why so many people are quitting their jobs. There’s at least some evidence that it’s concentrated in a relatively small number of states. But we don’t really know. All we know is that fate picked up the world like it was one of those Christmas Snow Globes, shook it hard and that afterwards things weren’t at all the same. What about inflation? Well, we know we had a global shipping system that was engineered to have very little slack or resiliency in it (just in time production and shipping) and it’s struggled to bounce back from the shock. But people are also buying more stuff. Do they have more money because of forced delays in consumption (lockdowns) or COVID relief checks? Probably. But much of this also seem tied to different consumer desires based on radically different life experiences.

Today we’re talking about inflation, ‘labor shortages’ which really seem to be code for people unwilling to work for pre-Pandemic wages and other issues that are immediate and often viewed through a short-term electoral prism. But we should have in the backs of our minds that we’re seeing shifts in mass behavior that at present we don’t really understand or understand only in the most limited ways. Social cataclysms of such duration that reach so deeply into everyone’s lives never fail to have transformative consequences that reach far into the future. This must be even more the case when they hit a society already in the midst of great social stress and instability.

Consider the following impacts:

• Deaths and illness of healthcare workers, and workers leaving the system because of stress and burnout. It takes years to train new nurses and doctors.
• The education system has the same problem.
• What are the long-term effects on children who have had their schooling interrupted for more than a year.
• Commercial real estate, which has been hit hard by the trend of office workers working remotely. 
• Social impacts of millions of people suffering from long COVID.

I could go on but I'm sure you get the idea.