Not really. Evolving a resistance to a particular antibiotic or other drug is (relatively) easy, because they usually target a fairly specific part of the microbe metabolism. Evolving a resistance to something like high concentrations of ethanol is hard, because you need to radically redesign huge parts of the microbe’s make-up.
For example, the reason alcohol-based hand sanitizer kills coronavirus is because the alcohol works as a solvent on the lipids making up the envelope surrounding and protecting the core of the virus. And since the lipids are scavenged from the parent cell’s membrane, the virus is not going to evolve a defense easily.
The reshuffling is coming in large part because America’s historic military dominance has less relevance in a world where the new forms of competition place greater weight on access to advanced research and technologies, rather than the projection of brute military force (especially given the increasing proliferation of nuclear technologies and the rise of asymmetric warfare). Furthermore, the lack of American manufacturing capacity has left it open to a significant loss of influence to the benefit of other regions, notably China (in Asia), and Germany (in the European Union).
That forecast, however, does not take the development of effective vaccines into account. It’s unlikely that there will never be a vaccine, given the sheer amount of effort and money pouring into the field and the fact that some candidates are already being tested in humans, says Velasco-Hernández.
It seems likely we’ll have a good-enough vaccine in 2021, doesn’t it? So hopefully we’ll avoid the worst-case forecast.
When the pandemic is over, one in six workers is projected to continue working from home or co-working at least two days a week, according to a recent survey by economists at Harvard Business School. Another survey of hiring managers by the global freelancing platform Upwork found that one-fifth of the workforce could be entirely remote after the pandemic.
What follows are three second-order predictions—for our economy, our workforce, and our politics. Because predicting the future is, like dart throwing, easily done and often misdirected, each prediction ends with the best argument I can think of for why it won’t actually come true.
This. I see covid’s impact on life as more an acceleration of things that were already happening slowly, or going to happen in the next decade or two, as a result of several forces we could easily predict but weren’t (aren’t) really doing anything to prepare for.
That said, what I hope happens might look more like this:
As author Phillip Pullman put it: “ It’s all got to change. If we come out of this crisis with all the rickety, flyblown, worm-eaten old structures still intact, our descendants will not forgive us. Nor should they. We must burn out the old corruption and establish a better way of living together.” And if you take a walk through a shopping area, an industrial site or office island, it’s clear; the old is dying before our very eyes, not due to the pandemic, but because it is devoid of vitality, totally and utterly. It’s finished, let it go, and let’s turn our attention to re-imagining society and the systems under which we all live; allow the transition into the new to creatively and harmoniously take place.
