When this is all over, the question will be how to beef up things that collapsed under the stress. There will be calls to:
Nationalize things that fail
Privatize things that fail
Distribute manufacturing more
Distribute inventory more
Distribute money more
Distribute time more
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This is the generic resilience debate that’s long overdue, via a “case study” that’s somewhere between a fire drill and the real SHTF thing. This is almost like the world itself is being administered a vaccine in the form of a partially deactivated crisis trigger.
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There will also be narrower conversation around pandemic response innovation:
Touch-free built environment
Rapid testing
Agile vaccine development and deployment
Social distancing based culture
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Conversations that are possible but unlikely to happen
First-response acute mental health management
Chronic stress management at population scale
Ultra-wealthy flight/exit culture (cost of billionaire bunkerism, which is unfortunately totally a real thing)
“Microgrid” economics
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I’m trying really hard to make a fair comparison to what I remember of SARS etc. Especially discounting for the effect of apocalypse larping by we the Very Online. This does feel different. It’s like living through a milquetoast Michael Crichton novel.
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It’s also very different from both 9/11 and Berlin Wall fall from what I can remember. Those were very human stories of extended impact. Here the star is a virus and the response after will be a reconsideration of the human-nature relationship, not human-human.
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It’s likely that there really is no living memory of something like this. People still alive (100+) who lived through Spanish Flu would have been babies in 1917-20.
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