After two months, China lifted lockdown in Shanghai yesterday, looking to do the same next week in Hubei region. Apart from protective masks, quite common even before Covid19, what has changed?

Citizens may be allowed to go out, paying attention not to gather in crowded places and obeying strict rules. At the entrance of any shop or restaurant, body temperature is tested and personal health code must be shown, to prove nobody is infected or comes from infected areas. 

How does this health code work?

It is a smartphone app, keeping track of our home, our movements and people we meet. It is usually green but, when we meet anybody infected, or someone living near us is tested as infected, our code will turn red and we shall be forced to stay home in quarantine. 

What kind of travels are possible?

China has suspended entry visas, forcing international arrivals to 14 days quarantine. We can easily assume that in the future traveling for other reasons besides work won’t be easy, maybe even impossible outside Europe. 

Today is our tomorrow, when our daily routine is based on a green light on our smartphone. We shall be even more connected, with the world under our fingers, but we won’t be allowed to see it with our own eyes. We have to sacrifice our freedom, privacy and social life in the name of economical and physical preservation of our species.

Adaptability to this new life will condition the development and well-being of the West in the coming years, and China is already 10 years ahead of us. 

How will our normality be in the future? How long do we still have to wait? Will anything change forever? 

In Italy, politicians and doctors have been repeating the same mantra for weeks “stay at home for a few weeks, after it we shall be able to go back to normal again”. Is this a promise or a hope? Will these extreme social distancing measures work? But what about the future?

China showed the world that, after six weeks lockdown, everyday life is already, slowly but steadily, coming back. 

Life won’t be the same though. We are in the middle of a “viral swarm” (Ilaria Capua) which is finally hitting us after several alerts in the past few years. We haven’t prepared both our health systems to detect and fight pandemics and our daily (work and private) life to sustain these social distancing measures. We ourselves are the offenders, we have sinned of pride, considering all this impossible.

We were used to free movement of people, goods and capitals, this was our definition of freedom. Now we have clear that what is happening on these days is likely to happen again in the near future, it will only be a matter of time and climate.  

ECONOMY

We shall change our routine as workers and consumers. Barriers will be raised between continents and countries, depending on their social isolation needs, lowering our ability to travel and to make goods travel. We shall need a smarter, more flexible and much shorter production chain. Large production industries will have to be fragmented in smaller ones in different countries, just like the actual shortage of medical masks has shown. 

The whole concept of our economies of scale will be different, based more on the medium term productivity during the pandemic crises than on simple cost cuts. After globalisation, we may call this period as autarkic globalisation. We will need much more flexibility, both for working time and job conversions. Survival of enterprises will be based on the ease of shifting from a “normal” period to a pandemic one, changing way of working and, mostly, goods that can be produced. 

We have to make our economy less human, to make it less weak.

EUROPE AND ITALY

The first days of emergency showed the poorness of coordination between Europe, Italy, Spain and Germany. More than ever a stronger, federal Europe is required, with a single policy on healthcare, defence and economy. 

To stabilise the economical situation during and after the lockdown, we shall need an expansive policy, with European investments in infrastructures, medical equipments for pandemic crises and to shorten the production chain of goods usually sold in our continent. 

To boost our export market, mainly towards third world countries, we shall need a European Sovereign Fund, to invest in strategic sectors (healthcare, infrastructures, IT and agriculture) outside Europe and offer financing solutions to clients of European companies all around the world. 

WE

Our individualistic society is proved hard by our collectivity emergency. Our own (Western) need for privacy and freedom is colliding with other people’s right to survival. We shall have to adapt our life more to community requirements than to our personal wishes, allowing state forces to overlook our movements, acquaintances and daily routine. Our whole life will be accessible and published online, just like what happened in Singapore a few days ago. 

Click here to see what happened in Singapore.

What now could look like a lack of freedom, will soon be accepted and, most important, asked by the vast majority of people. Our democracy values will be outdated as we won’t need them. Our future will be made of communities, not of individuals. 

Some years ago we celebrated the birth of the internet of things. We didn’t know that, some time later, we would have become part of it, things ourselves. 

We won’t have to wait long as we won’t come back to normality.