French media article: The new crown has deeply changed our lives

On December 7, the website of the French newspaper Echo published an article titled "How the New Crown Has Deeply Changed Our Lives", written by Jean-Marc Vittori. The full text is excerpted below:

We are not out of this trouble. In France, the number of new confirmed cases of COVID-19 is still increasing, the pressure on hospitals has risen sharply again, and the presidential palace has always been inseparable from the health committee. Globally, the Aumecreon variant, which began a month ago, may be more contagious, but it is not yet known whether it poses greater danger and is more resistant to vaccines already vaccinated by billions of people.

However, this unique pandemic began two years ago. This is no longer a temporary phenomenon, nor is it a pause in the implementation of quarantine measures in the spring of 2020. The longer it goes on, the more changes the health crisis will make in our lives.

This is not a "post-era world", that is, a deadly epidemic that makes us suddenly aware of the bad behavior of the past. From a broader perspective, this is a world that will have to adjust our needs in the face of constraints. The longer the pandemic lasts, the more normalized this adjustment becomes, and it will make previous trends more pronounced, sometimes affecting some of the scenarios for ecological transformation.

Tourism is the most typical example of this change in demand. People's travel has been restricted since a year and a half ago. Recently, some travelers to Morocco have even been stranded at the airport due to flight cancellations. We have to think more when we go out, and we also need to minimize going to other places.

Practitioners of the travel industry, whether travel agencies or airlines, seem to believe that this is just a temporary phenomenon, and once the virus is controlled, tourists will return to the world.

However, this is not a foregone conclusion. Before the outbreak of COVID-19, there was the movement of "flyskam" – the "shame to fly" from the Nordic countries. For many people, long-distance travel is not only a health risk, it is also ecologically harmful. Health concerns may disappear in a few months or years, but ecological concerns will not.

Long-distance travel won't go away, and neither will business travel, but the market may not be so booming anymore, but will become more mature. Short trips are likely to be more favoured, as seen in France this summer.

Many other service industries may also change after the pandemic. Movie theaters are likely to be like this, where viewers may turn to video-on-demand so they can comfortably watch movies in front of the growing size of the TV screen in the living room. People did start to return to theaters but things improved slowly, going to the screening hall mainly to see big-scene films rather than feature films. The situation is similar in restaurants, where ordering takeout is still not back to pre-pandemic levels.

After a few months, online shopping has become the norm and the trend is difficult to reverse, and even some elderly people are getting used to online shopping. The retail industry has had to continue to try to adapt to this situation. Such changes may cause many urban patterns with shopping malls as aggregation points to be reconstructed. And that's not all. During the pandemic, our consumer behavior has also changed. Spend less on services and buy more products (so you can work from home).

There are reasons to think that the change is only temporary, as some service sectors have closed their doors during the quarantine measures. However, some of the changes may continue because our lives are different from before.

Of course, change also involves work, and the biggest change is remote work. But nowadays companies want to fix the way of working, because in recent years companies have been tired of constantly adjusting the way of working. Many work contracts should not lose sight of the fact that telecommuting exploded at the beginning of the outbreak, but then it has been rapidly decreasing. For example, in October of this year, only one in five employees worked from home for at least one day a week. Maybe it's a good opportunity to rethink the way you work.

Source: Reference News Network