11 ms·

Covid-19, Civil Unrest Could Trigger Mass Migration in Post-Pandemic World

31 points by harambae 6y ago

downerending 6y ago
It's a plausible idea. I already life in a relatively "safe" place, and yet I find myself considering moving to an even "safer" shack in the remote woods somewhere. Feels like a storm is coming...
- closeparen 6y ago
  Given the medical nature of the storm, I’d really stay within a reasonable drive of a proper hospital. A lot can happen on the helicopter ride to civilization, and that’s assuming the system is healthy enough to offer you one. If things get really bad, humanitarian aid may or may not come for the cities, but it’s definitely not coming for a cabin in the woods. Are you prepared to live off the land?
  - neilv 6y ago
    Good point about hospitals, and aid in general. In a disaster affecting a large area (including adversely impacting aid from outside one's area), rural people will have to be more self-sufficient than city people, but they're also in a better position to be. Rural strategic advantages I imagine include: lower cost of living, ability to own rather than rent (lower risk of homelessness?), land to grow food and have animals, space to store and build necessities, space for disease distancing, trade with nearby farmers when city supply chains disrupted, more likely culture of neighbors knowing each other and looking out for each other. Some of my "college town" city-slicker disaster strategy (focused on economic, natural disasters like hurricanes, industrial accidents, and bad actors) didn't quite play out with Covid-19: * Despite our money, we couldn't insulate sufficiently from catastrophically bad action by national leadership. * One of our own big-money biotechs who should've known better actually created the initial superspreader event in Boston. * The wildcard fact that we're nationally strategic (economic, prestige, and military tech) and also have students of much of the world's most wealthy and powerful here, didn't matter for external aid in this scenario. (Our governor even had to engage in cloak&dagger, to keep medical worker PPE we'd bought from being seized by national.) (And, though having the children of the wealthy&powerful here might be an asset for getting aid in local/regional disasters -- acknowledging the other side of how awful some disaster-hit poor areas of the US have been treated in pre-Covid recent memory -- that mattered less when "outside" was also struggling and had no aid to give, and maybe wouldn't have mattered as much anyway, after the universities sent students home.) And problems that were predictable, if one had been thinking of pandemic as a likely near-term scenario: * We're densely-packed, mostly in old apartments with quirks and problems, often with roommates, and relatively little open space. * The substantial number of self-absorbed people accustomed to getting what they want doesn't help. For example, the several joggers who huffed&puffed past me on my own street's narrow sidewalk in the space of 10 minutes last week, only one even bothered to pull up a cloth mask as they passed. And generally only ~50% mask use rate among non-joggers on that same street last week, on a straight shot line between Harvard and MIT. What so far has played out here better than it might've, I suspect is due to Cambridge and the Boston area having a lot of smart officials who care about doing their jobs well, a wealth of medical personnel and resources, a relatively progressive culture by US standards that resulted in a lot of attention being focused on helping the less fortunate here, the fact that the universities and colleges eventually told the students not to come back after spring break debauchery-acclerated pandemic spreading, overall passable public effort at distancing&masks, and a good amount of money to make that all easier. (That's not to say that there aren't already countless family tragedies locally due to Covid, nor that unfathomable human misery around the world hasn't been caused -- only that the local situation could've been even worse already, if we didn't have some things in our favor.)
    - lsllc 6y ago
      For COVID19, MA has done terribly at 7576 deaths for a population of ~6.7M [0]. At 1090 deaths per million, that's worse than the UK (620 deaths/millon) and Belgium (843 deaths/million) [1]. MA is only eclipsed by NY (1570/1M), NJ (1400/1M) and CT (1160/1M) [2]. It's not the joggers we need to worry about, it's the elderly/infirm (average age of the dead is 81) and long term care home inhabitants (63% of deaths) [0]. [0] https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-13-2020/download https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-13-2020/dow... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Buy a Boy Scout Handbook. It has good first aid instructions. Better yet, take an EMT class. A few months of evening classes and you are very well prepared for mishaps.
  - downerending 6y ago
    Excellent points, especially for the "medical" part of the storm. But against that, we must weigh the reduced likelihood of infection in a remote place. Furthermore, I think most of the storm is not really medical. I'm feeling something more like the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" coming. Hard to know how to handle that, but perhaps best to seem like a peasant with few opinions. And for gods' sake, stay the hell off of social media.
- spaceisballer 6y ago
  Hopefully it’s a storm of change. The only dangerous protests were the ones with all the armed white people who want haircuts. We have been having many large peaceful protests for days. It’s uplifting for that to be happened, sure the news brought attention to looting and riots initially, but that’s subsided.
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    > The only dangerous protests were the ones with all the armed white people Who was hurt? Did I miss a headline?
    - downerending 6y ago
      No, GP is detached from reality. Nothing to see here.
      - ignoramceisblis 6y ago
        But if a lie is repeated enough...
    - bigbugbag 6y ago
      Boogaloos have killed cops and are suspected to have open fire on crowds during protests. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/17/facebook-shuts-down-groups-where-boogaloo-suspects-posted-before-ambush-attacks-on-bay-area-cops/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/17/facebook-shuts-down-g...
  - dTal 6y ago
    All mass gatherings are dangerous and all will cost lives. I'm dismayed that it's no longer "woke" to draw attention to this.
- fsociety 6y ago
  You probably already know this, but if you move to a more remote location make sure to have an epi-pen and good first aid kit. When you need it you really need it, speaking from experience.
dkdk8283 6y ago
I lived in NYC for 10+ years and I’m so glad I left. You’re trapped. No personal space. If the city closes bridges and tunnels you have no ability to egress unless you want to break the law or rent a helicopter. Now that I live in a rural area I can be self sufficient for a few weeks, I’m armed, and my local neighborhood watches out for each other. I feel completely safe where I’m at and I couldn’t imagine going back to dense/city life.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  You clearly don't feel completely safe because you are armed and need a neighborhood watch.
  - mailbag 6y ago
    I interpret it as being armed and the neighborhood watch are reasons for GPs feeling of safety.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      In the E.U. in any developed country if you are not in a bad neighbourhood, the chances of dying in homicide is so low, that people are considered crazy if they have a gun for ,,protecting themselves''. I just went through a cancer blood test panel, which somewhat decreases my chances of dying, but I never thought of buying a gun.
      - m0zg 6y ago
        > if you are not in a bad neighbourhood Same in the US. But if you _are_ in a bad neighborhood, it's probably safer to be in Kabul.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
pnako 6y ago
I don't think it's going to be huge, but in France most people indeed fled Paris. Perhaps this event has convinced many people that telecommuting actually works, and we'll see a durable increase in people working from home, and avoiding public transportation.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I'm doubtful we are going to see any significant change. All the things that were drawing people to cities will continue to do so when the thing is over.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  > most people indeed fled Paris That seems ... implausible? Some people left yes, but not most surely...
  - vermorel 6y ago
    The French government did give 48h for people to choose their place of indefinite lock-down mid-March. Based on the limited statistics that I did gather over my ~50 employees based in Paris, roughly half of them went away from Paris just prior the lock-down.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    More than a million people according to phone data: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-paris-france-lockdown-one-million-orange-phone-data-a9429896.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-... Out of a population of 10 million so "most" is incorrect however it is a surprisingly large number.
    - bigbugbag 6y ago
      You misinterpreted something here. The phone data is partial data as it is from a single mobile phone networks out of the four. It has been since updated to 2 out of the 4 (the other two supposedly respect their customer privacy). These number are not about Paris, which has a population of around 2 millions people, but for the whole metropolitan area. For the actual city of Paris 600 000 people left the city in a matter of days in relation to the lockdown announcement, or about 27% of population. https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356 https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356
JohnClark1337 6y ago
Escape from New York will be real. Cool.

31 points by harambae 6y ago

It's a plausible idea. I already life in a relatively "safe" place, and yet I find myself considering moving to an even "safer" shack in the remote woods somewhere. Feels like a storm is coming...

closeparen 6y ago
Given the medical nature of the storm, I’d really stay within a reasonable drive of a proper hospital. A lot can happen on the helicopter ride to civilization, and that’s assuming the system is healthy enough to offer you one. If things get really bad, humanitarian aid may or may not come for the cities, but it’s definitely not coming for a cabin in the woods. Are you prepared to live off the land?
- neilv 6y ago
  Good point about hospitals, and aid in general. In a disaster affecting a large area (including adversely impacting aid from outside one's area), rural people will have to be more self-sufficient than city people, but they're also in a better position to be. Rural strategic advantages I imagine include: lower cost of living, ability to own rather than rent (lower risk of homelessness?), land to grow food and have animals, space to store and build necessities, space for disease distancing, trade with nearby farmers when city supply chains disrupted, more likely culture of neighbors knowing each other and looking out for each other. Some of my "college town" city-slicker disaster strategy (focused on economic, natural disasters like hurricanes, industrial accidents, and bad actors) didn't quite play out with Covid-19: * Despite our money, we couldn't insulate sufficiently from catastrophically bad action by national leadership. * One of our own big-money biotechs who should've known better actually created the initial superspreader event in Boston. * The wildcard fact that we're nationally strategic (economic, prestige, and military tech) and also have students of much of the world's most wealthy and powerful here, didn't matter for external aid in this scenario. (Our governor even had to engage in cloak&dagger, to keep medical worker PPE we'd bought from being seized by national.) (And, though having the children of the wealthy&powerful here might be an asset for getting aid in local/regional disasters -- acknowledging the other side of how awful some disaster-hit poor areas of the US have been treated in pre-Covid recent memory -- that mattered less when "outside" was also struggling and had no aid to give, and maybe wouldn't have mattered as much anyway, after the universities sent students home.) And problems that were predictable, if one had been thinking of pandemic as a likely near-term scenario: * We're densely-packed, mostly in old apartments with quirks and problems, often with roommates, and relatively little open space. * The substantial number of self-absorbed people accustomed to getting what they want doesn't help. For example, the several joggers who huffed&puffed past me on my own street's narrow sidewalk in the space of 10 minutes last week, only one even bothered to pull up a cloth mask as they passed. And generally only ~50% mask use rate among non-joggers on that same street last week, on a straight shot line between Harvard and MIT. What so far has played out here better than it might've, I suspect is due to Cambridge and the Boston area having a lot of smart officials who care about doing their jobs well, a wealth of medical personnel and resources, a relatively progressive culture by US standards that resulted in a lot of attention being focused on helping the less fortunate here, the fact that the universities and colleges eventually told the students not to come back after spring break debauchery-acclerated pandemic spreading, overall passable public effort at distancing&masks, and a good amount of money to make that all easier. (That's not to say that there aren't already countless family tragedies locally due to Covid, nor that unfathomable human misery around the world hasn't been caused -- only that the local situation could've been even worse already, if we didn't have some things in our favor.)
  - lsllc 6y ago
    For COVID19, MA has done terribly at 7576 deaths for a population of ~6.7M [0]. At 1090 deaths per million, that's worse than the UK (620 deaths/millon) and Belgium (843 deaths/million) [1]. MA is only eclipsed by NY (1570/1M), NJ (1400/1M) and CT (1160/1M) [2]. It's not the joggers we need to worry about, it's the elderly/infirm (average age of the dead is 81) and long term care home inhabitants (63% of deaths) [0]. [0] https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-13-2020/download https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-june-13-2020/dow... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  Buy a Boy Scout Handbook. It has good first aid instructions. Better yet, take an EMT class. A few months of evening classes and you are very well prepared for mishaps.
- downerending 6y ago
  Excellent points, especially for the "medical" part of the storm. But against that, we must weigh the reduced likelihood of infection in a remote place. Furthermore, I think most of the storm is not really medical. I'm feeling something more like the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" coming. Hard to know how to handle that, but perhaps best to seem like a peasant with few opinions. And for gods' sake, stay the hell off of social media.
spaceisballer 6y ago
Hopefully it’s a storm of change. The only dangerous protests were the ones with all the armed white people who want haircuts. We have been having many large peaceful protests for days. It’s uplifting for that to be happened, sure the news brought attention to looting and riots initially, but that’s subsided.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  > The only dangerous protests were the ones with all the armed white people Who was hurt? Did I miss a headline?
  - downerending 6y ago
    No, GP is detached from reality. Nothing to see here.
    - ignoramceisblis 6y ago
      But if a lie is repeated enough...
  - bigbugbag 6y ago
    Boogaloos have killed cops and are suspected to have open fire on crowds during protests. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/17/facebook-shuts-down-groups-where-boogaloo-suspects-posted-before-ambush-attacks-on-bay-area-cops/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/17/facebook-shuts-down-g...
- dTal 6y ago
  All mass gatherings are dangerous and all will cost lives. I'm dismayed that it's no longer "woke" to draw attention to this.
fsociety 6y ago
You probably already know this, but if you move to a more remote location make sure to have an epi-pen and good first aid kit. When you need it you really need it, speaking from experience.

dkdk8283 6y ago

I lived in NYC for 10+ years and I’m so glad I left. You’re trapped. No personal space. If the city closes bridges and tunnels you have no ability to egress unless you want to break the law or rent a helicopter. Now that I live in a rural area I can be self sufficient for a few weeks, I’m armed, and my local neighborhood watches out for each other. I feel completely safe where I’m at and I couldn’t imagine going back to dense/city life.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
You clearly don't feel completely safe because you are armed and need a neighborhood watch.
- mailbag 6y ago
  I interpret it as being armed and the neighborhood watch are reasons for GPs feeling of safety.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    In the E.U. in any developed country if you are not in a bad neighbourhood, the chances of dying in homicide is so low, that people are considered crazy if they have a gun for ,,protecting themselves''. I just went through a cancer blood test panel, which somewhat decreases my chances of dying, but I never thought of buying a gun.
    - m0zg 6y ago
      > if you are not in a bad neighbourhood Same in the US. But if you _are_ in a bad neighborhood, it's probably safer to be in Kabul.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago

pnako 6y ago

I don't think it's going to be huge, but in France most people indeed fled Paris. Perhaps this event has convinced many people that telecommuting actually works, and we'll see a durable increase in people working from home, and avoiding public transportation.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I'm doubtful we are going to see any significant change. All the things that were drawing people to cities will continue to do so when the thing is over.
tluyben2 6y ago
> most people indeed fled Paris That seems ... implausible? Some people left yes, but not most surely...
- vermorel 6y ago
  The French government did give 48h for people to choose their place of indefinite lock-down mid-March. Based on the limited statistics that I did gather over my ~50 employees based in Paris, roughly half of them went away from Paris just prior the lock-down.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  More than a million people according to phone data: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-paris-france-lockdown-one-million-orange-phone-data-a9429896.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-... Out of a population of 10 million so "most" is incorrect however it is a surprisingly large number.
  - bigbugbag 6y ago
    You misinterpreted something here. The phone data is partial data as it is from a single mobile phone networks out of the four. It has been since updated to 2 out of the 4 (the other two supposedly respect their customer privacy). These number are not about Paris, which has a population of around 2 millions people, but for the whole metropolitan area. For the actual city of Paris 600 000 people left the city in a matter of days in relation to the lockdown announcement, or about 27% of population. https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356 https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356

JohnClark1337 6y ago

Escape from New York will be real. Cool.