Covid 19--How the novel coronavirus will change everything

Not yet facing the emotionally draining horror of working to take care of people in a system that is overwhelmed, I am full of ideas. I am fascinated with the way the response to this global pandemic has transformed pretty much everything. People are willing to do very difficult things and large, slow systems are speeding up their processes to try to mitigate this disease's bad effects. Could have been faster, but that's in the category of regrets for which we have no time.

The first cases of acute respiratory distress syndrome from a novel coronavirus were in Wuhan, China in December 2019. At first they were thought to be SARS (another coronavirus with a different scary history). By the beginning of January the virus was characterized and found to be a different respiratory virus. It was called SARS-CoV-2 (I think that is an acronym for "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2"--sort of like Terminator-2. Except that there were nearly 18 years between the original SARS outbreak and Covid 19, only 10 years in the Terminator movies before Arnold Schwartzeneger was "back".)

I digress. In early January, Hong Kong had begun to regulate any travel from mainland China, limiting the spread in that tightly packed city of 7.5 million people. Testing became widespread and quarantines were enforced. Case numbers increased slowly. The first case outside of China was in Thailand where a Chinese woman had returned from Wuhan. Singapore had cases, but tested extensively and at low or no cost, with strict quarantines. Spread there was slow and manageable. South Korea and Iran had many cases, with 8% of Iran's parliament infected. Good data is hard to get from Iran.

China quarantined the provinces most affected by the viruses, but the disease still spread within China. It spread much more slowly than would have been predicted had there not been quarantines. Inside Hubei province people were forbidden from leaving their homes for anything other than medical emergencies and essential work. Cases increased exponentially in February. By March there were cases in most countries in the world. Italy had an outbreak that led to closing nearly all businesses after an initial quarantine involving Northern Italy didn't appear to have been effective. Stories of horribly overpopulated hospitals and patients dying for lack of care made it obvious that the epidemic was not going to spare wealthy countries. The US was reporting deaths amid grossly inadequate ability to test for the virus. Meetings, concerts and other gatherings were cancelled. Travel was/is restricted.

But you know all of that. It's ongoing. Also the stock market was devastated. Poor people of course suffered and will suffer more than people with good financial resources. School closures impacted working parents. None of this stuff is really in the past tense. Unprecedented. We don't know what's going to happen actually. But humans are infinitely creative. Eventually good things will come of this.

Good ideas (in no particular order):

1. We should really be testing extensively. It's going to look pretty dire, because we are only testing really sick people right now which means that our numbers vastly underestimate the majority of minimally symptomatic people who are walking around infecting their contacts. Knowing that would make social distancing seem like less of a burden and more of an excellent idea. But even more exciting, knowing who is infected would allow people to find out when they are immune and not contagious (for mild cases, probably 2 weeks after they test positive--don't know this for sure but if it follows the flu, may be about this.) When they are immune they can be out and about and don't need to shun their fellow humans. They can go to struggling restaurants and go to work, including healthcare jobs. They can donate immune blood serum which has been shown to lend some benefit to patients with severe disease. Testing should be the new fad. 
2. All of this not-traveling is likely reducing carbon pollution by who knows? Orders of magnitude? We thought we couldn't do this, but we can. We can not travel much. We can not travel for work. We can not commute to work. Already I see lots of shared tips for how to do meetings online. Our church is having its first Zoom service in a couple of days. Being together is great, but after this pandemic is over, we're going to be able to include lots of people who couldn't ever come because they were too old or sick or lived out in the sticks. I do love traveling but it turns out I also really love finding out that I don't have to leave home for that meeting in April. Maybe not even the one in May. OK, I'm disappointed a little, but not destroyed.
3. Resource management: I know that in hospitals where they are taking care of far more patients than they can, people are finding out ways to do more with less. Lots more with lots less. What works? What are they safely re-using? What parts of workflow (I'm thinking endless documentation) are just not helpful to patients? After this is over, do we need to go back to standard operating procedures?  Nursing homes have been a necessary evil. But patients are being discharged earlier than is customary, they have to be, and they probably aren't being discharged to nursing homes. What is happening to them? Will we find that we have other options that work? 
4. Infection control: Covid 19 is much worse than our seasonal flu, but influenza is always bad and we don't seem to take it nearly as seriously as we should. In a bad year influenza kills over 50,000 people, in a good year 15,000. If we get serious about hand washing and don't go to work or get together with people when we are sick during flu season we could save many lives and avoid so much misery. After this year, we are going to be really good at community infection control.
5. People become kinder to each other when bad stuff happens. What will that look like in this golden age of shaming and snark? Will we find our hearts?