How will coronavirus reshape our daily lives post-lockdown?
The idea that coronavirus will reshape the world is now commonplace. There is endless speculation about supply chains, surveillance, and the international balance of power.
But on a more intimate level coronavirus had already started to reorder our lives even before the formal lockdown. In the weeks before the order was given millions of Britons were adapting their behaviour. When the lockdown ends many of these adaptations will stay.
Pre-lockdown the advice to keep a distance was already reshaping how we greeted one another. The handshake went out of fashion and is unlikely to come back. Even the French are mournfully contemplating the end of “la bise” as a greeting. I admit to feeling some melancholy there. France will not seem France without it.
What will replace our traditional greetings longer term? At Paris Fashion Week held in late February in the shadow of coronavirus – a decision that now seems so reckless – attendees pioneered the bicep squeeze. Tensing to show off your muscles will become the new version of the crushing handshake deployed by the domineering. Alternatively, the elbow bump may come into vogue – though I must admit that I find the movement a little awkward.
Still, while the measures avoid skin-on-skin contact some might still find them too touchy. Thankfully other options exist. The modern might like to adopt the so-called Wuhan foot tap, pioneered where the disease started. For the traditional or self-consciously retro, old-fashioned cap doffing, bowing, or namastes will do.
When it comes to choosing the foot tap seems a dangerous invitation to tread on toes, while cap doffing runs into the issue that few wear hats indoors.
Bowing is fairly ridiculous, while Namastes – an Asian gesture, both hands pressed together in greeting – is practical, but I fear it would take me a while to shake off my sneaking fear that I will look as pale and prattish as Justin Trudeau did when he tried it on a trip to India
Another, high likely, Asian import will be mass mask wearing in public. Some are sceptical about the usefulness of masks (I am personally on the pro-mask side), but the weight of social disapproval is probably going to drive the dubious into compliance.
Indeed, widespread mask wearing in parts of East Asia is the legacy of another infectious disease, a pneumonic plague that spread in Manchuria 1910-11. The plague was contained thanks to the efforts of the brilliant Oxford-educated Dr Wu Lien-teh. The measures deployed included the development of the modern surgical mask that he recommended be worn by the general public. Now, just as then, fashion quickly caught up. Models wearing stylish masks briefly appeared in advertisements early 20th century China just as they appeared on Paris catwalks a few months ago.
The one exception to mass mask wearing will likely be America where, with depressing inevitability, coronavirus has become another culture war. Some of the more frothing figures on the American right are attacking masks as signs of cowardice and tyranny – even as men with bandannas covering their faces ostentatiously stood outside the Michigan governor’s office toting military rifles as part of Trumpian anti-lockdown protests.
Masks aside, Asia is going to lead the way in other aspects of post-coronavirus life as well. South Korea is relaxing strict social distancing into everyday distancing. This involves not just replacing handshakes with bowing, and widespread mask use, but also measures such as temperatures being taken before visitors are let into buildings and rearranging seating in offices and schools to increase distance.
Our hospitals may also soon find themselves equipped with special infection control units and negative pressure rooms. They exist in South Korea already as a legacy of a 2015 MERs (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak. Alternatively, we could build Nightingale-like excess capacity into our hospital system to deal with epidemics akin to the old fever hospital system that helped deal with outbreaks of infectious diseases in the early twentieth century.
Other South Korean recommendations, such as imploring crowds at sports matches to restrain their throaty (mucus spraying) roars of approval and disapproval, seem more hopeful than practical. Still, at least this might help tame some of the excesses of the House of Commons.
On international travel, Hong Kong illustrates why it is going to drop off sharply for the foreseeable future. Travellers getting off a long international flight now spend about 8 hours bombarded with health declaration forms to fill, apps to download, tracking bracelets to wear, free thermometers, self-testing kits, and instructional videos on how to self-test before they are allowed in to the city to self-quarantine for 14 days.
If this is the procedure at one of the world’s swishest luxury airports in a polity whose coronavirus controls have been exemplary I shudder to think of the British version. I can already taste the luke-warm complimentary sandwiches served to the damned souls waiting in an echoing half-empty Gatwick. Alternatively, while Boris’ alternative to a third Heathrow runway on a Thames estuary island is now deader than ever as air travel falls off a cliff, but perhaps it can have a strange second life. Islands have, after all, long been used as holding pens to quarantine new arrivals.