It took a global pandemic and stay-at-home orders for 1.5 billion people worldwide, but something is finally occurring to us: The future we thought we expected may not be the one we get.
We know that things will change; how they’ll change is a mystery. To envision a future altered by coronavirus, Quartz asked dozens of experts for their best predictions on how the world will be different in five years.
Below is an answer from Satchit Balsari, an assistant professor in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was previously the director of the Global Emergency Medicine Program at Weill Cornell Medical College/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
In five years, millions are likely, in many ways, to be where they were five years ago. They would have just managed to halt the downward spiral of destitution that economic disruption from the pandemic would have unleashed upon their lives. But the isolation and extreme hardship that has resulted from not only the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, but the collective mismanagement of it, will also result in a reckoning in which millions more will recognize the direct linkages between political participation—or the lack thereof—and its consequences. And we will have resumed the process of building a just society.
To read more New Normal answers, click here.