UKH

Given everything has been so negative regarding the impact of Covid-19 - from the obvious deaths and disability, to financial ruin and inequality, there must be some positive impacts.

In a similar manner to wartime, there's been hugely accelerated scientific progress. Incredible that we've developed multiple effective vaccines that have been deployed in the space of the year.

Some of these technologies have the potential to improve healthcare way beyond just infectious diseases. The mRNA vaccine technology and cancer treatment for example.  This is going to be in addition to the immunotherapy treatments that are already transforming things like melanoma

There's no doubt it's an ongoing shitshow, and we're not going to see the end of it this year, or even the next, but we're going to be way better equipped to deal with something like this, as well as all kinds of other diseases in the future.

Interested in other potential positive aspects!

The shift to working from home eliminates a lot of climate cost (transport) and saves people a lot of personal time (commute time).

Biotech is seeing record and near record growth globally.  This will go on to benefit people immensely although without appropriate regulation and governance it may drive the inequality wedge further.

There’s more awareness that many people doing essential work get the raw end of the deal societally; I don’t see much coherent change emerging there, but the pump is primed.

A lot of people have spent a lot more time with their children and subsequently reevaluated their priorities.  

Home-working - good for the environment, good for the work-life balance (provided we address the issue of companies expecting people to respond 24/7), good for your sleep, good for family life etc.  Would make operating public transport cheaper, too - the railway for example has vast fleets of expensive rolling stock in the South East that basically does two trips a day and sits in sidings the rest of the time.  Doesn't have to be isolating, you could go into the office when collaboration is needed in a more "workshop" style.

Perhaps people may value low-paid "key workers" more.

Pratting about with the idea of healthcare free at the point of use would be highly politically unpalatable for many years.

The dangers of misinformation on social media are being realised.

There's no armies of meatheads getting pissed out of their minds round 'ere. Feels better to me. 

It’s quite worrying that just a few posts in and we have more positives from a deadly pandemic that has killed millions and changed all our lives forever than we have managed to get out of the whole brexit thread! 

Well I can think of several benefits from the pandemic, but am struggling to think of ones for Brexit, except maybe that we've managed to get ahead with vaccine deployment, and my Dad's happy!

Pandemics have always created social change; the 1349 plague was an enormous driver of social change, ending serfdom.

Brexit is just ideological nonsense.

A lot fewer people are catching flu.

A lot more people seem to be walking and cycling for exercise. 
 

Less planes in the sky. 
 

Hopefully some of the people who were hugely in favour of furlough at 80% of normal wages for themselves but normally oppose anything more than bare minimum for other people in normal times will reflect on whether they're really so very different.

Of course, some of them have decided that spending this much time with their children is horrifying and their priority is to get away from them!

More seriously, I hope some people's experience of trying to home educate their own children might make them re-evaluate the value they place on those trying to do it for 30 children at a time.

Personally, I've loved home working. I'll be delighted to get back to the office part time and see some colleagues in person but I don't plan on ever going back full time if my employer is amenable, which I suspect they will be. They never tried very hard to pull people back in during the troughs in case numbers.

Helped get rid of Trump 

The climate impact is unfortunately pretty negligible given the requisite net-zero timescale under Paris: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x

I am never going to shake anyone's hand again. I always thought it was a weird unhygienic thing to be doing. 

That seems rather sad, I have really missed the simple human contact of shaking people by the hand.

Dolphins in Venice 

Table service in pubs 

I hope it highlights the dangers of over-globalisation

Surely nobody advocates for general imposition of the kind of levels of isolation that would have been needed to stop Covid spreading? Or is that not what you meant?

When I was a student, I had a first appt with a new GP, who as it turned out was old-school and nearing retirement. So I breezed in and shook his hand before he had time to react and he looked at it as though he’d been bitten by a viper.

There is some research however that if you make some physical contact, however small, in a commercial situation, you get better service. Whether this applies in a romantic context was not stated ...

certainly not so extremely

I'm all for regionalisation to reduce the effect of transport on climate change as well, concentrate trade with neighbours

I personally without doubt advocate that we need to seriously reduce food miles, to the extent that if we can produce a given food here ("here" can mean regionally, not just nationally) it should not be imported other than as a very occasional luxury, and we should eat more seasonally to avoid importing things simply because they are out of season here.

There is also a case to do the same with a fair whack of manufacturing, that would have the added benefit of giving us a manufacturing industry back.

Similarly we should build a combination of nuclear and renewable electricity schemes and seek to electrify our whole transport network (plus move heating to heat pumps etc) so as to reduce our dependency on imported oil and gas and the related geopolitical mess.

In this very rural sparsely populated area there has been far more impetus for HF radio nets to keep us in touch with friends, unprecedented in recent years, rather a nice round table of chat.

Got one coming up in half an hour ...

Yeah, I don't really disagree with any of that. I just don't see a strong link to Covid.