Three years ago this week, it sank in that this coronavirus thing was serious. I’d just attended a conference in London that, with hindsight, may have been a superspreader event. Hospitals were filling up. Several million deaths from the virus were — correctly — being predicted. Every plan you’d made was being cancelled. On March 11 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Many of us spent the next two months indoors.
That spring transported us into a new era that will probably last our lifetimes. It’s an era in which the top priority of rich countries is not consumption or climate or defence but health. Leaving aside the virus, our societies are the oldest in history, and getting older. Overwhelmed health services may never return to the barely manageable levels of demand of 2019. The past three years offer an early glimpse of the health-focused society.
Longer lives are modernity’s best achievement, but also the priciest. More older people means more healthcare, more long-term care and more pensions. Democracies will spend that money, pushed by the ever-growing “grey vote”. That means the post-Covid big-state era will be the new normal. Then add on the costs inflicted by climate change. (We’ll scrimp on preventing it.)