Coronavirus and the Ceremony of Innocence

The coronavirus pandemic has, by historical standards, not been very impressive. Despite the wildly implausible projections promulgated by the World Health Organization (WHO), the consistently inaccurate forecasts of our government “experts,” and the absurd predictions of the “news” media, COVID-19 is unlikely to produce an ultimate U.S. death toll equalling that of the 1957–58 Asian flu.  That virus produced the deadliest epidemic the country has endured since World War II, killing 116,000 people, or about 0.07% of a U.S. population of 172 million. As of this writing, it looks as if COVID-19 will probably end up killing about 100,000 Americans, or 0.03% of the current U.S. population of 331 million (UPDATE: As of August 3, the U.S. has reported around 154,471 deaths from COVID-19, or 0.05% of the population). Nonetheless, all pandemics — whether they kill millions or merely thousands — have a way of permanently affecting our lives. The following is a brief list of some ways in which COVID-19 will change the way we live.

The remote revolution will finally arrive. For more than two decades, we have been hearing that the age of brick-and- mortar was about to end, that the “gig economy” would soon bring about theextinction of the traditional office and its grotesque offspring — the cube farm — just as surely as carbon dioxide will destroy the planet. Yet, like those portentous prophecies about the demise of Mother Earth, predictions about the imminent death of the office have thus far been no more accurate than the fabled IHME coronavirus fatality projections. The traditional white-collar workplace has proven remarkably resilient. We have continued to allow our children to be raised by people who would be otherwise unemployed in order to operate expensive and dangerous machines on crowded roads to reach drab little rooms where we spend countless hours working on devices and software that could be set up at our homes by any normal ten-year-old. Why?

It’s pretty ...