How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed societies around the world, and what are its lasting impacts on the way humans think and live?
I am interested in this question because it’s such a recent development that there is still so much left to be learned about how a worldwide catastrophe such as a pandemic can change the face of humanity. I want to know on the large and small scale how both individual lives and entire populations have been forced to adjust to the most radical and intense event that humans have had ever experienced in decades. I want to know if any of these changes that took place became normalized to the point where they became permanent additions to how humans choose to live with each other. I did not experience a huge shift in how I lived my life during the last two years in which this pandemic happened. The rest of the world went through huge shifts without me and I want to know what they were all about.
In my research I expect to find that the pandemic has radically changed how the fundamentals of the medical system works directly because of how huge of the strain the pandemic has put on the infrastructure of it. Hospitals now must definitely have in place preparations in the event that another pandemic could happen. Places and business have had to make themselves pandemic proof in order to adjust to changes such as social distancing and because of that might make those changes permanent additions to their environments. How people interact with each other was a huge part of the pandemic as I have learned. No longer being able to physically interact with other people must have been draining on most as humans are social creatures that need interactions with other humans in order to feel stable. Online interactions must have increased ten-fold as it became one of the only means to speak with others through platforms like zoom and discord. Educational Institutions were probably one of the places worst hit by the pandemic as students could not have been allowed to walk through school grounds and thus online courses had to have increased by a huge amount in order to compensate for the lack of physical presence in schools.
Any new information that I find that goes against what I expected is completely welcome because it is still valuable information about the ongoings of what the pandemic has wrought on human civilization. It’ll probably surprise me and thus change my views on what I thought was possible for events like the pandemic to change in us.
