7 Predictions for a Post-Coronavirus World
7
Predictions for a Post-Coronavirus World
Remote work, automation, and telemedicine could
soon become the new normal
Emma
Rose Bienvenu Apr
13, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic will be remembered as
a world-reordering event. Like the
Great Depression, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the 2008 global
financial crisis, it will accelerate social and economic changes that would
otherwise have taken years to materialize.
However long it will take, we will eventually beat back this virus, and
our economies will eventually recover from the punishing recession it will have
brought about. But when the dust settles and the masks come off, the pandemic
will have permanently reshaped our social and economic behavior. Here are a few
outcomes that seem increasingly likely.
1. Companies
that traffic in digital services and e-commerce will make immediate and lasting
gains
With people isolated indoors and away from other people, short-term
winners will be those who provide goods and services without needing to come
into physical contact with their customers.
Winners in this category will be cloud computing providers (for
example, Amazon Web Services), remote work services like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft
Teams, virtual reality companies like Oculus, streaming services like Netflix,
and esports organizations like Cloud9.
Social media traffic will soar, but advertiser revenue will suffer from
weak demand in a crippled economy. Coca-Cola has already pulled all social
media ads; as its peers follow suit, the sharp overall decrease in ad spend
will reverberate down to production companies, advertising agencies, and TV and
radio stations.
In the short term, e-commerce platforms, food delivery services, and
logistics companies will also be winners. When the economy does eventually
improve, these gains will mostly endure thanks to entrenched shifts in
consumers’ buying habits.
2. Remote work
will become the default
Employees
who are suddenly working from home by necessity are
experiencing a change in their work style that spares them the suit and commute
and gives many of them greater flexibility with their schedules and demands
outside of work. Many will find they prefer working remotely and, when the
crisis recedes, it will become hard and expensive for some companies to deny
them that option, while others will want to take advantage of this new
preference. Remote work technology will improve, enabling the sort of mingling
previously thought to require in-person meetings. This will cause a severe
downturn for commercial real estate as companies drastically cut the size of
their workspaces.
Coupled with stricter travel restrictions and mandatory quarantines for
foreigners entering certain countries, this will also put severe strain on
industries reliant on business travel. It will also lead to an exodus of white-collar
workers from big cities — once companies’ remote work routines have been
smoothed out, their newly remote-capable employees will have the flexibility to
move out of dense cities and into lower-cost areas.
3. Many jobs
will be automated, and the rest will be made remote-capable
To survive the crisis, firms will need to lay off their
least-productive workers, automate what can be automated, and make the rest
remote-capable. Those who do this effectively will emerge leaner and more
efficient. They will also have no incentive to return to their pre-crisis head
count — and many of those whose functions have been automated will lack the
skills to compete in the new, post-crisis economy. Labor force participation
will suffer. In the medium and longer term, these companies will also realize
that the functions they have made remote-capable can also be performed by
highly skilled workers in lower-cost countries. In short, jobs
will first move from in-person to remote-domestic, and in time they will go
from remote-domestic to remote-overseas.
4. Telemedicine
will become the new normal, signaling an explosion in med-tech innovation
In a matter of weeks, regulatory barriers to telemedicine in the U.S.
have largely fallen. Doctors in the U.S. now perform remote visits across
state lines, can email and video-chat patients in compliance
with HIPAA, and Medicare and health insurance providers have to now reimburse
telemedicine services. Though these measures were announced as
temporary, those who have now had firsthand experience with the convenience and
cost-effectiveness of telemedicine will not want to forgo it. Once the crisis
recedes, health care will begin to be provided remotely by default, not
necessity, allowing the best doctors to scale their services to far more
patients. Already, shares
in Teladoc and similar companies have surged on the expectation
that the pandemic will provide long-lasting tail winds for the telemedicine
industry.
The human and economic cost of the pandemic will inject Department of
Defense-level spending into telemedicine, medical imaging companies,
diagnostics companies, and virology research. Telehealth offerings will improve
and proliferate, with better at-home testing and diagnostics products and the
ubiquitous adoption of wearables that continuously monitor for symptoms. Major
cities will put in place permanent pandemic surveillance systems, and many
businesses and sports stadiums will perform real-time threat monitoring by
screening for symptoms and temperature-checking attendees.
5. The
nationwide student debt crisis will finally abate as higher education begins to
move online
The pandemic has forced
numerous universities to move classes online, prompting
calls from students for reimbursements of tuition and expenses. If,
come fall semester, universities are still teaching online, what percentage of
those students will re-enroll at pre-crisis tuition levels? The worldwide
remote learning experiment that is currently underway may demonstrate that
higher learning can function effectively at a fraction of in-person costs. If
it does, it may lead to a reckoning that transforms the delivery of higher
education, particularly for less-selective universities, as students re-weigh
the costs and benefits of a four-year residential experience.
Universities will also face pressure to cut costs from the severely
cash-strapped state governments that fund them. Many will eventually adopt
hybrid models that limit face-to-face learning to project-based assignments and
student working groups. These will dramatically cut costs, while allowing the
best instructors to scale their insights to more students. They might also make
a compelling case for broadening access to elite universities, whose small
cohorts have historically been justified on the basis of physical constraints
inherent to classrooms and campuses.
6. Goods and
people will move less often and less freely across national and regional
borders
Countries will retreat into themselves, borders will become less
porous, and international trade will slump. To bolster their ability to survive
extended periods of economic self-isolation, governments will push to
strengthen domestic manufacturing capacity and step in to inject adequate
redundancy in critical supply chains. Even before the pandemic struck, higher
wages in China, international trade wars, and the rise of semi-autonomous
factories had already prompted firms to reshore manufacturing, bringing it
closer to domestic research and development centers. The coronavirus crisis
will accelerate this trend: Increasingly, corporations will favor the
resiliency of centralized domestic supply chains over the efficiency of
globalized ones. Lacking support to protect the shared gains of worldwide
economic integration and globalized supply chains, the multilateral
institutions of global governance established in the 20th century will, if
temporarily, begin to fray.
Governments that adopted emergency powers to manage the crisis and
police their borders will
be loath to relinquish them when it recedes. Governments will
conduct more widespread and more intrusive surveillance and claim broader
authority to monitor and respond to viral threats. Checkpoints at national and
regional borders will use biometric screening to detect deadly viruses in real
time and impose mandatory quarantines on travelers entering from certain
countries. This will create significant friction for all kinds of travel.
Airlines, hospitality, and tourism will experience a severe slump in demand in
and beyond the immediate aftermath of the crisis.
7. After an
initial wave of isolationism, multilateral cooperation may flourish
After an initial retreat from globalization, countries might come to
recognize that technological and viral threats are existential, and therefore
require international cooperation. Adopting a sense of pragmatic
internationalism, countries would develop international norms, monitoring and
reporting systems, and coordinated response and contingency plans. When the
next pandemic strikes, global monitoring and reporting systems would detect it
earlier. A coordinated global response would make self-isolation orders
effective, shortening the economic shutdown and hopefully sparing lives.
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