The covid-19 pandemic has transformed all our lives
Lockdowns have forced us to change
How we socialise
How we shop
How we work
But as vaccination rates rise, parts of the world are opening up…
It’s a wonderful feeling to go back to a festival like this again
But which changes are temporary...
...and what’s transformed for good?
To answer that question The Economist has crunched data...
...to create a groundbreaking new index
The amazing thing about this pandemic compared with all previous...
...pandemics is the amount of data we have
The results show that the world is never going to be the same again
This is not the first time a pandemic has changed the world
Historically, crises revolutionised societies...
...fuelling technological advances and kickstarting social change
In the 14th century the Black Death plagued Europe
Back then lockdowns were brutal
Infected people were locked up in confined spaces to die…
...and there were different approaches to social distancing
About a third of Europe’s population died from the plague...
...but from the devastation came innovation
Having fewer workers...
...encouraged the development of new technologies...
Labour was much more scarce and so...
...that, some historians think, led to the development...
...of labour-saving devices such as the printing press...
...because, you know, you don’t want to be paying scribes...
...to copy things out
You’d rather have a machine that could do it more cheaply
Some theories even suggest the Black Death...
...made Europeans more adventurous
Piling onto a ship seemed less risky...
...when so many people were dying at home
In the following decades, dozens of expeditions explored new lands
Fast forward a few centuries and the flu pandemic of 1918...
...looked surprisingly similar to what we’ve experienced recently
Schools, theatres and businesses were shuttered
There were mask mandates…
...and anti-mask protests
Up to 100m people died from the flu
That’s more than triple the number that died in another crisis...
...you might be more familiar with: the first world war
The flu hit as the war was ending and both ignited change
If you look at the first world war, the men went to the front...
...and so women had to work in factories...
...and took on a lot of jobs that they’d previously not been able to do
So it had a big impact on how people saw the equality of the sexes...
...and whether it was appropriate for women to work and so forth
And after the pandemic ended...
...businesses were inspired to take more risks
From 1919 the number of startups in America boomed
We can notice these historical changes in hindsight
Today, it’s possible to quantify change as it’s happening
The amazing thing about this pandemic...
...compared with all previous pandemics is the amount of data we have
I mean, the fact that we're all walking around...
...with these computers in our pocket
...we’ve just got that sensor network that's sort of inherently there
We’ve got an unprecedented amount of data and in fact...
...almost more than we can deal with
An ideal situation for a data journalist like James…
...he’s crunched the data to create an index for normality
So the index that I've made basically looks at 50 countries...
...at behaviour in those 50 countries around the world
And the idea behind it is to track how things have changed...
...during the pandemic and how behaviour might persist...
...beyond the pandemic
To make his index...
...James analysed eight different indicators of behaviour...
...which can be split into three categories…
The first is transport...
...flight data, public-transport usage and traffic congestion
The next is leisure use...
...sports attendance, box-office takings and time spent outside the home
Last, how business is being done: office occupancy and retail footfall
That gave James thousands of data points to analyse
Based on all this data we arrived at a baseline...
...for what global normality looks like
Where 100 reflects normality...
...zero means that there’s no activity at all...
...and a value of over 100...
...means that activity is occurring at greater levels...
...than occurred before the pandemic
This line is our overall global normality index
It reflects in aggregate how behaviour has changed...
...over the past 18 months around the world
We looked at 50 countries in total...
...and every country looks a little bit different
For example, here is the chart for Britain
You can see that activity fell dramatically last spring...
...as restrictions came in
Activity rose once more through the summer before falling...
...as the second wave occurred
And since then activity has risen...
...as the vaccination programme has got under way
To see how the index looks in your country, click on the link
Data are great at giving a sense of what the world looks like now…
...but the index can’t predict the future
Tom, The Economist’s resident future-gazer is trying to
The world before the pandemic is gone
We’re not going back to it
The big question is, to what extent are things going to snap back?
We’re not going to snap back all the way
It’s clear that people aren’t going to go on doing all the things...
...they’ve been doing in the pandemic
But nor are they going to go back to the way things were before
So the answer is going to be somewhere in the middle
And exactly where it is in the middle...
...is going to vary by country, by activity, by industry, by household
And so that’s what makes it so unpredictable
So we’re entering into a hybrid world
Where people do things online as well as off
This has been a pretty big change for most people
But especially for Italians. Specifically, how they shop
One of my favourite examples concerns e-commerce in Italy
So, Italians were not big shoppers online before the pandemic
They like to buy things in person
It’s a very social experience to go shopping in Italy
During the pandemic it was a different story...
...restrictions here were tough
And in the first half of 2020...
...more than 2m Italians...
...tried online shopping for the first time ever
Today, despite restrictions being lifted...
...the amount of people shopping in-person in Italy...
...is still below pre-pandemic levels
There are all these stories of Italian grannies...
...sort of getting addicted to Amazon and...
...realising they can buy things with a few clicks...
...and then buying all sorts of stuff
That’s an example of how, you know...
...when you discover a new way of doing things during the pandemic...
...you’re likely to want to go on doing it
Amazon is betting on the fact that they will keep doing it
It’s hiring thousands of new employees in Italy
But our new online lifestyle goes way beyond shopping
Possibly one of the biggest long-term changes from the pandemic...
...is going to be more people working from home
Our index shows that office occupancy is rising...
…but it probably won’t ever rise to pre-pandemic levels
Companies will probably let people work from home or the office
I quite like working from home
One of the things I like the most is not having to put on a shirt...
...and a suit to go to the office
I can just put on a shirt when I need to
Right now, for example, I'm wearing shorts and I've got sandals on
Tom is very modern wearing his shorts for work…
...but it’s not just about new trends...
...we’ve also rediscovered some old ones
There’s one case where rather than being accelerated into the future...
by the pandemic, we’ve gone back into the past...
...and that’s with drive-ins or drive-throughs
The number of drive-in cinemas across Britain...
...has exploded from three to 40 during the pandemic
And it’s not just the UK...
Walmart car parks...
...many of which may have been drive-ins in the first place...
...got repurposed as drive-ins during 2020
There was a nightclub in Germany that did a sort of drive-in night...
...so we’ve had this sort of return to the drive-through...
...back to the 1950s vibe, even as in other respects...
...we’re being accelerated into the 2030s
But we will only know the full impact of the pandemic once it's over
And that could be a long way off
Until you've got really, really widespread coverage...
...with vaccines that are really, really good at handling these variants...
...then we’re not going to see the back of this pandemic
But using data to chart the changes we’re all living through...
...helps us make sense of it all
It’s been really good to see people’s rise in interest in numbers
It’s the first time that I’ve seen...
...charts on the headline ten o’clock news on the BBC or ITV
We’re sort of adding to that flood of data with this...
...normality tracker. But, you know, it is a tracker that’s showing...
...how things are getting better rather than...
...a thing that lets you obsess on how things are getting worse
I'm James Fransham, I’m a data journalist at The Economist
To see the latest data of our Global Normality Index, click on the link
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