What Will Society Look Like After Coronavirus?
Things can get better. They can also get significantly worse.
Coronavirus has changed everything. Some of us are still working, but a lot of us are isolated, unable to work from home, and running out of distractions. Many of us — artists, writers, musicians, podcasters — are using this time to create. Others are learning a new skill. A lot of us are simply living in the moment, trying to get through the difficulties with minimal stress. Some are mourning lost loved ones, or dealing with physical separation from our friends and families. It’s normal to feel anxiety at this time, to feel the need to take time away from the news, focus on ourselves and our immediate family. Our feelings of anger and uncertainty for our future are understandable. Our lives have been disrupted, we will have to adapt, make a new normal for ourselves.
It’s normal to grieve.
But what we cannot do is become complacent. We will emerge from this pandemic and we need to decide what world we would like to come back to.
There is no going back to before Covid-19; that much is clear despite the fervent wishes of the public and the promises of politicians. Our world has been irrevocably changed by this event, an event so disastrous that it can only be compared to the Great Depression or a World War, and that will have repercussions on our societies, economies and cultures. We have a chance to shape our future in the wake of this destruction.
We could make great progress in social welfare and public health. We have the opportunity to reshape our governments for the better, to use this shared tragedy and the compassion we have fostered for each other to improve our lives after the crisis. Already, many governments around the globe are implementing or at least considering measures which were thought of as unthinkable before the virus: the UK Conservative government’s furlough scheme which will pay up to 80% of furloughed employees’ wages; free childcare for care workers in some places; mass housing of the homeless; China sending doctors to Italy to help with the outbreak there. Even the US, proudly neoliberal, is taking steps towards the left. Trump has promised that some renters will be protected from evictions during the crisis, though renters are still accruing debt to their landlords. Coronavirus testing might be free of charge — although tests are hard to come by — and Biden suggests coronavirus treatment may be free of charge under his leadership. Mandated paid leave has been implemented for mid-size businesses. Stimulus packages have been promised. It’s by no means adequate, but it is nevertheless a step forward. There are talks of mortgage holidays and rent freezes. Perhaps even universal income….
Of course, these measures are temporary. There is no doubt, at least in the UK and the US, that these vaguely socialist measures will be reversed as soon as the news backlash wouldn’t be too extreme. The reason our governments have responded — and far too late at that — is not because they have any compassion for our minimum wage workers, homeless population or other such people, but because they cannot afford not to act to prevent total societal collapse. It also makes them look good. As soon as the threat is over, the aid will stop.
However, now that we know what is possible, we can make this shift permanent. There’s historical precedent for this: the formation of the NHS can be directly attributed to the desire to rebuild after World War II; FDR’s New Deal was in response to the Great Depression; social housing in the UK was increased after World War I and II. We can overhaul the system in response to coronavirus too. This crisis has highlighted the importance of an efficient social safety net which does not humiliate benefit claimers and is easy and quick to obtain when needed, and it certainly has shown that a robust health service is vital. The homeless of the UK have been housed in a monumental weekend-long effort in order to contain the spread of the virus, with a relatively small amount of money — £1.6 billion — provided to local councils to fund this. Though the quality and permanence of the housing is unknown, this begs the question of why this was not done earlier. Flexible working conditions and working (and learning) from home have been keeping things going in these last few weeks and there is no reason why this cannot continue. As a disabled person, I have found the lack of flexibility to be an arbitrary barrier to many jobs — many people can be productive from home, and there is no reason for alternative arrangements to be less acceptable. We have seen the proof that the reasons these measures weren’t introduced earlier was not, as conservative politicians claimed, that we could not do it, but that they did not want to.
There is a different world that could emerge from coronavirus — a far more terrifying one. We have seen glimpses of this already in Boris Johnson’s callous arguments for a herd immunity approach, as without a vaccine what this meant was many needless deaths merely to keep the economy ticking. “Strength”, “bravery” and “sacrifice” have been the buzzwords, as if Boris Johnson’s bout with the virus was noble and his recovery was due to qualities of his character rather than the care he received. On the internet, many posts from ordinary people have had nasty implications that are more insidious than his laughable policy condemned by the WHO. There are talks of survival of the fittest, as though health and a good immune system are the only valuable qualities in a person, as though physical weakness is a moral failing. Politicians and pundits in the US have been open about pushing social Darwinist propaganda. Then there are complaints about social distancing rules, professing individual freedoms as more important than the collective good, as though protecting our most vulnerable is not a worthwhile endeavour. These complaints have culminated in protests in America, deliberately jeopardising public health. Numerous conspiracy theories float around, accusing the Chinese government of purposefully creating the virus or otherwise blaming them, fostering racism towards Asians. This is more than internet nonsense — hate crimes towards East Asian people have increased because of coronavirus. Even environmentalists have been sharing some dubious posts; the talk around the clearer waters in Venice and the resurgence of animals in quiet cities has a sinister, ecofascist undertone. While it is true that some are simply looking for hope or a silver lining in this desperate time, it seems some see this as proof that our planet is overpopulated, that nature is reclaiming it from us, that the deaths caused by Covid-19 are good, actually.
We need to be vigilant when it comes to these views. We need to push back against the callousness and propagate messages of compassion and community, even socially isolated community. We need to hold our politicians to account for their actions during this crisis, and not only for their slowness to act to contain the spread of infection, or the lack of funding to our healthcare systems and organisations like the CDC, which has contributed to the impact of the pandemic. We have seen the stories of American senators valuing stocks over their citizens, profiting from disaster by insider trading while assuring the public that coronavirus isn’t a problem. Additionally, many US states, such as Idaho and Alabama, have used the media reporting primarily on coronavirus as a smokescreen to push through anti-transgender legislation without protest. Hungary’s right-wing government has also sought to end the legal recognition of trans people, using temporary powers granted by the pandemic to hurt vulnerable people. The leaked Labour Party antisemitism report has been buried under coronavirus news (please read about it, it’s very important to the future of the UK). The response to this from otherwise empathetic people is tragic: this doesn’t matter, stop complaining, we need to focus on coronavirus right now. As though anything will be done later.
But there is hope. There are stories of communities organising to strike on rent payments to corrupt landlords who refuse to be reasonable. Some are shopping and picking up medicine for those in their neighbourhoods who cannot leave the house for health reasons. Our healthcare workers are doing their very best to help us all in this crisis, despite great risk to their personal welfare. Huge numbers of people have been in touch with organisations hoping to volunteer. The NHS has been thanked and held up in pride by everyone in the UK over the last month. Humans can be remarkably selfless — we can be so when there isn’t a pandemic too.
If we aren’t careful, we can easily let despicable people use our understandable preoccupation with Covid-19 to shape a worse world for us to live in, and they will lie to us and call it necessary or inevitable. Austerity measures did not work for the last recession, and caused many deaths — they will not work after coronavirus either and conservatives will try to force them on us again. We need to decide if we value humanity enough to push back against the elite, and shape a more compassionate, empathetic world instead, which puts people before money. We need to push for socialist change, and never give up. We need to protest when it is safe to do so again. Change can be incremental, but that’s okay, we can keep fighting for better. We just need to make sure we don’t slide backwards.
We can’t let creeping authoritarianism win.
Wash your hands, stay inside, keep fighting.
