COVID-19 Warning
When I was reading the Stern and Kalof reading about methods of scientific inquiry, my mind naturally went to the current coronavirus crisis. I doubt this will be a very original blog post, considering that most people’s minds are on COVID-19, but this entire situation will be analyzed for years to come. Not only is it a serious pandemic, but it affects almost every sector of life. Labor, the economy, education, government, healthcare, sports, and more have been deeply affected by COVID-19. So how will we analyze this crisis?
The first way is through naturalistic observation, answering this basic question: what happens in a pandemic? I’m sure there are people tracking how colleges and universities, sports leagues, and different industries have responded to coronavirus. Journalists and historians are likely documenting the situation as well, trying to figure out what is going right and wrong. This applies across all of the areas that COVID-19 has affected. But naturalistic observation is more likely to raise questions than answers. For example, we know how different governments responded to the crisis, but how can they improve for next time? That question can be best answered by retrospective case study.
It is likely that COVID-19 will serve as the case study for most future pandemics, because it actually escalated to the highest point of any pandemic in the last 100 years. It also takes place at a moment of unprecedented ability to document information for future study, making it easy to go back and study what happened. Of course, the operations of government and politics in this period will be studied, but another interesting angle is the rise of teleworking. How much efficiency do companies actually lose from employees working at home, and could this lead to a future where offices are less necessary to run a business? Despite all of the destruction and havoc caused by the coronavirus, it could very well lead to huge changes in how our lives function after the crisis is over.