The Covid year has highlighted the crucial role that many low-paid professions play in maintaining human civilisation: nurses, sanitation workers, truck drivers, cashiers, delivery people. Of course, humans are still physical beings, and not everything can be digitalised. Mounted police in Hanover, Germany, disperse a group playing in a park © Rafael Heygster/Helena Manhartsberger When the coronavirus circulated through the physical world, many people shifted much of their lives to the virtual world, where the virus couldn’t follow. Today many of us inhabit two worlds - the physical and the virtual. In 1918, humanity inhabited only the physical world, and when the deadly flu virus swept through this world, humanity had no place to run. But the fact that it could be done at all is astounding. It has also created previously unimaginable problems, such as lawyers appearing in court as cats. The switch online has many drawbacks, not least the immense mental toll. If students and teachers hunker down in their homes, how can you hold classes? Today we know the answer. In 1918, it was unthinkable that offices, schools, courts or churches could continue functioning in lockdown. Whereas international tourism plummeted in 2020, the volume of global maritime trade declined by only 4 per cent.Īutomation and digitalisation have had an even more profound impact on services. The tourists can stay at home and the business people can Zoom, while automated ghost ships and almost human-less trains keep the global economy moving. But tourism and travel are not essential for trade.
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True, cruise ships with hundreds of tourists and aeroplanes full of passengers played a major role in the spread of Covid-19. The container ship OOCL Hong Kong, christened in 2017, can carry some 200,000 tons while requiring a crew of only 22. In 1582, the English merchant fleet had a total carrying capacity of 68,000 tons and required about 16,000 sailors. A largely automated present-day container ship can carry more tons than the merchant fleet of an entire early modern kingdom. In 2020, global trade could go on functioning more or less smoothly because it involved very few humans. Lockdowns therefore have only a small impact on farming.Īutomation and the internet made extended lockdowns viable, at least in developed countries Almost all the farm work is done by machines, which are immune to disease. In the US, only about 1.5 per cent of people work on farms, but that’s enough not just to feed everyone at home but also to make the US a leading food exporter. Today in developed countries this is no longer the case. For thousands of years food production relied on human labour, and about 90 per cent of people worked in farming. While in some parts of the developing world the human experience was still reminiscent of past plagues, in much of the developed world the digital revolution changed everything.Ĭonsider agriculture. Even more importantly, automation and the internet made extended lockdowns viable, at least in developed countries. In contrast, in 2020 digital surveillance made it far easier to monitor and pinpoint the disease vectors, meaning that quarantine could be both more selective and more effective. And if you ordered the entire population of a country to stay at home for several weeks, it would have resulted in economic ruin, social breakdown and mass starvation. In 1918 you could quarantine people who came down with the dreaded flu, but you couldn’t trace the movements of pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers. In previous eras humanity could seldom stop epidemics because humans couldn’t monitor the chains of infection in real time, and because the economic cost of extended lockdowns was prohibitive. Moving life onlineĪlongside the unprecedented achievements of biotechnology, the Covid year has also underlined the power of information technology. In the war between humans and pathogens, never have humans been so powerful. Within less than a year several effective vaccines were in mass production.
Within a few more months it became clear which measures could slow and stop the chains of infection. By January 10 2020, scientists had not only isolated the responsible virus, but also sequenced its genome and published the information online. The first alarm bells about a potential new epidemic began sounding at the end of December 2019.
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