[MUSIC PLAYING]
LUIS BETTENCOURT: This disease is quite extraordinary
because it's transmitted through physical proximity.
So it's a special challenge for city-dwellers for a more
interconnected world.
PRESENTER: The coronavirus is changing life
as we know it on a daily basis.
In "COVID 2025," we'll explore how the pandemic
is rewriting our future.
LUIS BETTENCOURT: This crisis is really challenging
how cities operate, not just in terms of their public health,
but fundamentally, as sort of networks
of interdependence and socioeconomic contact
and interaction.
The virus, kind of its pattern of contagion and spread
gives us an X-ray of our own societies.
We see very clearly, for example,
that when it enters a large city,
it propagates much faster, that the number of cases
grows faster.
Its attack rate is bigger than in smaller communities.
And so this is kind of reinforcing ideas
that we've had for a long time about urban science
and about how cities work.
It gives us really a special X-ray into this relationship.
So we see issues of inequality and neighborhood effects.
The different places in cities for different socioeconomic
groups are different.
So what is critical through this unfolding crisis that will also
be absolutely critical in the long-term
is that we are able to learn from this.
So on the one hand, what we know historically-- cholera,
as an example, 100 years ago or more--
is that cities that were able to respond effectively,
that were able to find ways to rid cities out of the pathogen,
but also create better sanitation, and in that case,
better ways, for people to interact that are safe,
but that also promote, in general, better public health,
were able to emerge much more reinforced and supported,
much more resilient from the crisis.
And so that is the big test of the current crisis,
is whether we can really generate a good articulation
of knowledge and policy that is responsive to circumstances,
and that can allow us to manage the situation before it
goes epidemic in the future.
There are many examples as to how
ordinary life is being impacted for most people
as a result of this pandemic.
A lot of the basic services that we depend on,
from restaurants to haircuts to all the little things
that we take for granted in city life
that are so important to make our life's work.
So in a city, I like to say that we're all interdependent.
So we depend immensely on these almost anonymous networks
of functions.
And all of these are being disrupted by this crisis.
And it's not clear exactly how they'll
be reconstituted as we come back from it and in what order.
So in some sense, we have to disassemble
this complexity of cities in order to fight the disease.
And in the process, the main objective
has to be also that we create better living
conditions, better health, to most people,
as well as the infrastructure to generate
better human development and sustainability.
One of the things that I think has not been recognized enough
is how fast the response from science has been,
that we're learning a lot about the parameters of the disease,
but we're also learning a lot, increasingly,
in terms of how human societies work,
what makes them more vulnerable, the role of having policy
that's well-informed, that's responsive,
and that is effective.
For example, the countries in Asia
that had experienced the first outbreak of a coronavirus
a few years ago were already much better
at dealing with this one.
The best scenario is that this is not just sort of one fight,
but it's really, specifically, an important
learning event that will allow us
to do much better in the future, not
just with this specific epidemic,
but many others like this, as well as
creating a whole new substance to have well-being and health
in these environments.
The worst scenario is that we don't do that,
that we don't learn from this, and that next time, we will not
only be equally exposed to a disease like this,
but we'll be also distrustful of our ability to respond
to an epidemic like this.
We'll be more distrustful of each other and institutions
and our systems of public health.
I'm optimistic that most places will
learn from this, that we're able to spread that knowledge
and actions such that we create well-being that's
more general, both in terms of places
and people inside cities, inside nations, and across the world.