I listened to some doctors and a ph.d. epidemiologist from Stanford and Harvard saying we will not experience the hump until sometime between July and September. Sorry, I don't have the link. But they predict it will be longer than anyone expects.
Thus my predictions that: There will be a lot more telecommuting. Businesses will realize how much cheaper it is not to provide real estate for their employees.
Also, massive numbers of small and locally owned businesses will go under and there will be massive unemployment for years until the economy recovers.
Lots of people will either lose their houses or sell them at a loss to keep from losing them.
Lots of brick and mortar retail businesses, even nationally owned ones, will go under, and lots more people will buy things online only or will order things like groceries online and do drive-thru pickup or have them delivered. Many, if not most restaurants and bars won't exist and that whole industry will have to be rebuilt from scratch.
There will be a reset of what people expect to be normal. People won't want to leave themselves this vulnerable again, and they will create a new normal that is more socially distant to strangers than it has been in the past. This will only be an extension of the now common practice of people staring at their phones and not interacting with people right in front of them in public. It will be a less trusting and more isolating atmosphere everywhere.
A public option for healthcare and a universal basic income will seem like completely rational options to millions of people who would never have expected to believe that up until the past few days or weeks. Those things may not pass immediately, but they will come much closer to reality than they ever have in the past. The public option probably will come to pass first, and some kind of new welfare society will be established, even if people don't get a UBI, there will be some way of getting money and food to people who can't enter the workforce, because there are no jobs.
There will be another migration away from cities, like there was in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. People will want more space between them and their neighbors than they have for the past 40 years or so, and because telecommuting will expand and housing will be cheaper, suburbs and rural areas will experience a lot of growth.
So many airlines will go bankrupt that new airlines will have to be established and at first they will be more expensive and will have far fewer travelers, because so many people won't have money.
Colleges and universities will go almost exclusively online, because it will be so much cheaper, and they will already be following that model. Ditto high schools and maybe even middle schools and younger.
Churches will lose vast numbers of members, first through deaths, then through people deciding the churches were full of shyt all along.
China or Russia may, indeed, emerge as the new world leader, but it could also be the US. It all depends on who we elect as president and who is left alive at the end of the run.
I could actually see things playing out like this
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