10 THINGS THE PANDEMIC HAS

CHANGED FOR GOOD

Working from home

The outbreak abruptly introduced tens of millions of workers to telecommuting, and data from
the Coronavirus Disruption Project suggests a lot of them like it. Forty-two percent of survey
participants said the experience has made them want to work from home more. More than 60
percent of those who are teleworking said they are enjoying the relaxed attire and grooming
standards, greater flexibility and lack of a commute, and 78 percent said they are as effective or
more so working from home.
"I think there will be some upside” to this disruption that workers will want to preserve, says
Debra Dinnocenzo, the president of VirtualWorks, a consulting firm that advises companies on
transitioning to telework. “People, families, are going to be spending more time together,” she
says. “I think people will be more adamant that they want more time to work at home and not go
back to all the crazy commuting they were doing before."
For many, that will sit well with their bosses. Nearly three-quarters of corporate finance officials
surveyed in late March by Gartner, a business research and consulting firm, said their companies
plan to move at least 5 percent of on-site workers to permanent remote status as part of their
post-COVID cost-cutting efforts.

Seeing your doctor

A survey last year by the University of Michigan's National Poll on Healthy Aging (which is
cosponsored by AARP) found that only 4 percent of people over 50 had seen a doctor virtually in
the previous year. More than half did not know whether their doctor even offered video visits.
Patients and practitioners alike were interested in telemedicine, says Preeti Malani, an infectious
disease specialist at the university and the poll's director, but in no great rush.
That has changed at “the speed of light,” she says. Doctors and patients who previously might
have considered telehealth only in limited circumstances, such as an illness while traveling or a
routine post-op chat, are now seeing that a wider range of services can be provided virtually.
Along with cutting out hassles like parking and waiting-room time, video visits make it easier for
family members to observe and participate, a big boon for caregivers.
"There was a lot of interest in trying to move telehealth and to really think about it carefully and
try to encourage it,” Malani says. “It was an aspirational goal, and it felt like it was a year or two
away, and it never would have replaced the things it has replaced. But because of necessity, it
really moved fast.”

Shopping for groceries

It's no surprise that the online purchase and home delivery of groceries has surged amid
coronavirus lockdowns. A March 2020 survey of more than 1,500 consumers by investment firm
RBC Capital Markets found that 55 percent had shopped for groceries online, compared with 36
percent in a similar poll in late 2018. The number doing so weekly nearly doubled. And
downloads of apps for delivery services like Instacart, Walmart Grocery and Peapod doubled,
tripled, even quadrupled in just a month.
RBC, which has taken consumers’ pulse on online grocery shopping regularly since 2015, dug
deeper into whether the changes might be lasting. More than half of those who purchased
groceries online said the COVID crisis made them more likely to keep doing so permanently.
Among those who shopped only at stores, 41 percent said they planned to try delivery in the next
six months. The results show “an inflection point” in consumer demand, RBC says — “a more
sustainable and permanent shift” in how we buy food.

Staying in touch
Zoom happy hours. Facebook Live watch parties. Virtual visits with loved ones. One key finding
of the Coronavirus Disruption Project is that while the pandemic has moved our social lives
online, people report that their relationships with relatives, friends and coworkers have not
suffered.
That doesn't mean we won't go back to getting drinks with friends (although going to bars ranked
last among 15 things the Center for the Digital Future asked people if they missed). But “the
whole notion of how we interact, socializing, has really been affected in a pretty profound way,”
Cole says, especially for the many older Americans newly adopting video tools to stay in touch.
"Zoom and videoconferencing, although we make fun of it — it's not enjoyable to be in hour
after hour — I think it does make people feel connected,” he says. “Plain phone calls now feel
sort of shallow. We're getting used to seeing people."

Wearing face masks

Wearing masks to stem contagion has long been commonplace in many Asian countries and
some Asian American communities. With COVID-19, it's taken hold among the larger U.S.
public, at the urging (and, in some areas, the mandate) of federal, state and local officials. Robert
Kahn, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, expects it to stay
that way.
"This is the kind of event that will lead to a sea change in mask wearing,” says Kahn, who has
studied American attitudes and stigmas about public face-covering. While “it's never going to be
a majority phenomenon,” he predicts the practice will become routine in some settings and
situations — in dense urban areas, for example, or when people with a cold or common flu need
to venture out.
"Masks aren't personal protective devices, they're social protective devices,” Kahn says.
“Everybody knows someone who is immunocompromised or has some of the COVID risk
factors, and I think that leads to a sense of, when you go outside you might want to wear a mask
— at least for enough of the population that, when you're making the decision, you won't feel
like a weirdo."

Going to the movies

The theatrical movie business was already in a decades-long decline, Cole says, accelerated in
recent years by the rise of streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon Prime and ever-shorter
windows before big releases move to smaller screens. Post-pandemic, he forecasts, “movies will
be one of the slowest things to return” and cinemas will close in droves.
Among 15 activities the Center for the Digital Future asked people if they missed while
sheltering in place, going to the movies ranked next to last. “Streaming has filled the gap,” Cole
says. “There will always be movies we want to see in the theater, but for most of us that's three to
five movies a year. The whole future of film and its distribution is now up for play. But what's
unquestionable is that theaters are only going to decline."
A bright spot for the business might be small independent cinemas, says Washington Post film
critic Ann Hornaday, who has reported on art houses’ shutdown strategies. Many have pivoted
nimbly to streaming indie-film fare and hosting virtual events, consolidating their communities
of cinephiles, and will likely keep doing so even when they reopen. Art houses “live or die by
knowing their audiences,” Hornaday says. “That relationship is going to bear fruit in a lot of
different ways."

Traveling by air
Fares, route options, airline choice and other aspects of flying may fluctuate wildly as the
industry adjusts to whatever new normal follows the pandemic, experts say. But travelers can
reliably expect a different experience in the airport and on an airplane, for years to come.
"We're going to see cleanliness matter more,” says Gary Leff, author of the influential air-travel
blog View from the Wing. “During challenging economic climates, airlines have been known to
go 18 months without deep-cleaning planes, to save money. Now, no matter how tough things
are, airlines will need to convince customers that these tight spaces on metal tubes are safe places
to be.”
Airports will have to up their hygiene game, too, more frequently sanitizing public spaces and
making room for people to maintain distancing in lines. Masks — which several U.S. airlines are
now requiring for crews and passengers — will remain common in cabins, Leff says, and “it will
be hard for airport security to roll back their willingness to allow larger hand sanitizer bottles
through the checkpoint."

Riding public transportation

The pandemic has put public transit systems in the unenviable position of urging people not to
use them unless absolutely necessary. Coming back from that will be difficult and will involve
changes in how transit agencies operate, especially when it comes to convincing people to return
to the close quarters of buses and subway cars, says David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the
Harvard Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government.
"There's lots of technologies that are already being developed now to enhance safety, including
steps like using UV light, reconfiguring buses to provide more space between passengers,
looking at doing temperature checks for people boarding,” he says. “Many riders could
appreciate knowing that the person standing or sitting next to them has been screened."
Many systems have slashed service as ridership plunged. The “worst thing that could happen,”
Zipper says, is for them to make those reductions permanent, as budget-strapped transit agencies
did during the Great Recession. “Once you do that, the riders, they change their plans,” he says.
“And they don't really come back."

Protecting your privacy

In the absence of a vaccine, contact tracing — the ability to track whom an infected person has
encountered and possibly exposed, using smartphone apps and Bluetooth technology — figures
prominently in strategies to contain the virus while easing social distancing. It is considered so
important that archrivals Apple and Google are working together to quickly develop and
distribute contact tracing tools.
The tech behemoths say their technology will protect the personal information users must share
to make contact tracing work, like their health histories and the identities of people they've come
in contact with. Cole is skeptical. “There's no way we come out of this without a loss of
privacy,” he asserts.
And, he adds, most of us probably won't mind. “Health trumps everything,” he says. “If we
really do contact tracing, it means we're going to have to let someone — the government, Google
— know where we are, report who we're next to. We just don't seem to care that much when it's
our health, our family's health."

Washing your hands

Thanks to the coronavirus, we all now know how to properly wash our hands (and how long it
takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice). And we won't soon forget, judging by new data from the
Bradley Corporation, a maker of fixtures and accessories for commercial washrooms that
annually surveys Americans on their handwashing habits.
Bradley's latest poll, conducted in early April to measure the coronavirus effect on hand hygiene,
confirms we are washing our hands more often and for longer. Seventy-eight percent of
respondents report lathering up at least six times a day, more than double the pre-pandemic rate.
Seventy-seven percent follow the 20-second rule; previously, most people washed for five to 15
seconds. And 88 percent say they are likely to maintain these habits once the pandemic is over.
With more than a third of Americans now classifying themselves as “germaphobes,” per the
Bradley survey, expect alcohol-based hand sanitizer to remain popular. Fior Markets, a business-
intelligence firm, projects the sanitizer market to grow by 7.5 percent annually through 2027,
with major producers such as Unilever boosting their manufacturing capacity to meet
coronavirus-fueled demand.