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> I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" This is not nearly, to my mind, as interesting as the quest
by mistersquid 3y ago
> I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?"
This is not nearly, to my mind, as interesting as the question "Was COVID the direct beneficiary of 21st-century technology?"
That is, would COVID have had the chance to spread intercontinentally without the benefit of affordable air travel which itself is the byproduct of workers enabled by cell phones, computers, and global economic trade?
Furthermore, had mRNA vaccines been available 25 years ago, many more millions of people exposed to the first virulent strains of COVID would have died.
The idea that workers would have been forced to RTO because WFH would not even be an option does not even rise to the level of fantasy, much less meaningful speculation.
- ghaff 3y agoYes, there was more air travel than 25 years prior. Looks like a little under 2x. That's not nothing but's certainly not an order of magnitude. And mRNA vaccines were presumably not going to be available 25 years ago. So I don't see the evidence that, had COVID emerged from China in about 1996 (which it may not have done but see other related diseases), it would have had so much less impact. (And if that were really the case, we'd just have ignored it in the West and you'd still be working in an office.)