March 2020 to May 2020 almost certainly marked the most significant short-term change ever in worldwide human behavior. Vast sections of the planet effectively froze in place for a few months, and then adopted, en masse, a whole new set of routines to flatten the curve and slow the spread — a genuinely new trick for Homo sapiens. It was not obvious in advance that such a thing was even possible.
Imagine, if you can bear it, what happens the next time word emerges of a novel virus devastating a midsize city somewhere in the world. The slow-motion reaction that characterized the global response to the news from Wuhan in early 2020 would be radically accelerated.
Even without public-health mandates, a significant part of the world’s population, particularly in cosmopolitan cities that were hit hard in the early days of Covid, would instantly mask up; where possible, workers would switch back to Zoom; unnecessary travel would cease.
No doubt some portion of the population would play down the magnitude of the threat or invent a preposterous conspiracy theory to explain it. But a meaningful number of people would switch back into the “pandemic mode” they learned in 2020-21.
