The ultimate fallout will be political upheavals resulting from the fact that the lessons of this experiment are impossible to unlearn. People will see the contradictions between what they were told to believe before, and how things actually work out. There will be two sides: those who want to retain their prior authority by going backwards, and those who no longer believe that option makes any sense.
I predict a leaner future. Either it will be because of collapse of food supply change leading to widespread famine conditions, or it will be because of a reconditioning of people to be happy eating less in quantity and in extravagance.
Human-based governments are not well equipped to handle the contradiction we are facing now. We have to make decisions now based on the influential population we have now. As a result, we are unable to consider the needs of the influential population we will have when this crisis is over. Most of the decisions made now will benefit people who will no longer be around when the future has to deal with the consequences. In addition many of those who do survive will be handicapped directly by the policies we made to benefit people who are no longer around.
I see a very grim future for current governments that are already trapped by their decisions with the only option to ratchet up the restrictions and government dependencies. It is possible that a brighter future could emerge under an algorithmic driven government with the properties described above of punctuated liberty with extensive data use.
From a policy perspective there is a opportunity choice to make. One, the government devotes resources to acquiring and managing ventilator inventories. Or two, the government devotes resources to finding a way for future patients to never need ventilators. It appears to me that we have decided on the first option, thus condemning future survivors to endure the lung damage from ventilators.
We may be wasting valuable energy and attention on obtaining, allocating, and stockpiling ventilators that are not going to change the overall statistical outcomes of this pandemic. We may be better off focusing our attention on other more productive avenues for protecting the population from reaching the point where ventilators are the last available option.
The question I want answered is what is the overall effectiveness of hospitalization for Covid19 compared to the effectiveness of home care even through the worst of the disease. In both settings some will die and some will survive. I imagine that hospitalization would save more lives than home self care. What is the marginal benefit of one versus the other?
