A wiser world after Covid

Another pandemic or global scale disaster is inevitable but the Covid experience will help us deal with it better

In October 2008, Viswanathan Anand was playing Vladimir Kramnik in a world title match in Bonn when one of his seconds, Suryasekhar Ganguly, contracted chickenpox. Ganguly continued to work, churning out his analysis and connecting to Anand and team members on Skype, while isolating himself in his hotel room, with food and other provisions left at the door.

At the time, Ganguly may well have been the only person doing this anywhere in the world. By October 2020, many millions were doing much the same thing.  Four years ago, give or take a few days, India went into lockdown along with most of the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic was civilization-altering. We don’t know how many people died directly and indirectly from Covid. Nor do we know how many died, or will die from Long Covid. We never will. Many mortality and excess mortality calculations have been done. But even the most highly indexed healthcare systems don’t collect enough reliable, granular data to reduce error factors to meaningful levels, when dealing with millions.

Moreover, even in the most open societies, where the processing and dissemination of inconvenient information is not considered a crime, there are political barriers to admitting high death tolls. Let’s just say it’s a very large number and this exercise puts earlier estimates of death tolls in wars, plagues, earthquakes, famines, etc., into perspective. The error factors must have been even larger.

The world also dodged a bullet due to several scientific breakthroughs in the early 2000s. If Covid-19, or something like it, had surfaced 20 years earlier, it would have taken five years to decode the virus, and develop effective vaccines and scale production. Scientific advances shortened all that to a matter of months. The new techniques also mean that the world’s labs will be more capable of handling the next epidemic. In certain areas, such as creating synthetic snake antivenin, those techniques will lead to further advances anyway.

Businesses also learnt hard lessons about several things they may never have thought about, but for Covid. Global supply chains in every industry were hit by bottlenecks, as key regions went into lockdown. This disruption continued, and continues, thanks to the Ukraine war and the Red Sea blockade following the Israeli invasion of Gaza. It is a tribute to the flexibility of businesses that most have managed to diversify supply chains and introduce resilience. The tools that allow for better derisking of supply chains have also improved efficiency.

Businesses also learnt about managing remote workforces. Within weeks of lockdown, the “Ganguly-Anand model”, if one may call it that, was implemented at scale. Businesses learnt they could function perfectly well without people sitting in offices, provided workers had decent broadband connectivity. Again, this would have been physically impossible until 4G.

A trend of distant work and flexi-time already existed but Covid forced companies to take it further. It also let people with some types of skill sets hold down multiple assignments. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 5G promises to make this even easier.

Of course, that also led to deep discomfort for some organisations. It does lead to legitimate fears of conflicts of interest : How can an IT worker with “X” skill set do exactly the same work for two rival firms, and what about the potential leakage of confidential information?  Hence, the push-pull that’s occurring now where many companies are doing their best to eliminate work-from-home paradigms and many workers are resisting, or quitting.

These things are partly cyclical since they depend on tightness of labour markets. But structural changes are also evident. Smart organisations have cut back on real estate needs after figuring out how many people need to be in physical offices. Workers have found new routes to happiness and financial well-being by quitting formal employment and getting different types of gigs. Again, the tools that developed to enable remote work have helped enhance efficiency.

Samuel Johnson once wrote that the prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully. The prospect of the deaths of untold millions helped to focus many minds. There will be other pandemics (that’s guaranteed) and there will be other disasters (also guaranteed) on a global scale. But maybe, just maybe, the Covid experience will help the world cope better with such situations.