Will Tanner is director of the think tank Onward.
LONDON — It was the experience of the West’s last great pandemic, the Spanish flu, that gave New Yorkers public housing.
In September 1918, when the disease’s deadly second wave was at its peak, the health commissioner, Royal S. Copeland, sent census-takers into the Italian districts to report on the human cost in the city’s poorest migrant neighborhoods. Their reports of overflowing, tuberculosis-ridden tenements moved Copeland to quickly hospitalize anyone displaying symptoms who lived in the often-substandard shared housing.
The information brought to light also drove the authorities to abolish the tenements altogether. In the years that followed, Copeland campaigned successfully for slum clearance and the erection of public housing, the first of which was built on New York’s Lower East Side in 1934.
It is a salutary reminder, albeit hard to believe, that the consequences of the coronavirus outbreak may be much bigger than temporary quarantine and economy-wide nationalization.
History suggests that social policy may change in a myriad of unexpected ways when this is all over.
History suggests that social policy may change in a myriad of unexpected ways when this is all over. The Black Death not only killed a third of Europe’s population, it reformed the rules of primogeniture: The absence of sons forced landowners to bequeath property to daughters for the first time.
The cholera epidemic that accompanied the “Great Stink” of 1854 saw Joseph Bazalgette commissioned to design the modern sewer system that London uses to this day.
The legacy of COVID-19 may yet prove as permanent. In the same way as the Spanish flu and cholera exposed poor sanitation, this virus has exposed vulnerabilities in the globalized world’s reliance on just-in-time supply chains, borderless travel and health care systems resourced for chronic demand, rather than surges of acute need.
The calls for many more intensive care unit beds and stricter border health checks will be irresistible. In the U.K, we could see a Conservative government consider legislation for minimum productive capacity of essential medicines and equipment — to ensure that our ventilator and vaccine capabilities are never again called into question. Pity the politician who takes up ideological opposition to steps that the experts suggest might curb the next pandemic.
In the next few weeks, the contentious issue of national identity verification will likely become not just mundane but desirable as the government adopts digital ID to verify those with immunity to the virus, allowing them to return to work.
The reform of social care, which has been postponed for decades, will also surely now become impossible to ignore, especially if those in the care system suffer higher mortality rates compared to those confined to their homes.
If reform is embraced, the result may look more like a network of modern almshouses and a national domiciliary care network than the insurance system for which many have advocated. If coronavirus is teaching us anything, it is that local communities are more resilient than atomized individualism.
Policymakers around the world might also reflect on the fact that those daily risking their health for ours — care workers, supermarket checkout staff, delivery drivers — currently endure the most precarious position in the labor market.
While basic labor market dynamics will not change, the next decade could see governments of all stripes race to give those workers better entitlements to sick pay, higher wages and parental leave and more protection from exploitation. The gig economy, already under scrutiny, will have to evolve.
Culturally, we are already witnessing analog habits transform into digital mores. A quarter of a century after the “death of distance” was heralded by the journalist Frances Cairncross, remote working and virtual communication have in a few days become normalized — even for grandparents.
Delivery drivers wait in organized “social distancing” chairs | Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images
But there may be human limits to digital adoption. The number of people flaunting restrictions in parks and volunteering in local mutual aid groups hints at a populace that values nature and local community more than our mostly cosmopolitan discourse typically lets on.
It would be surprising if, after months of solitude, powerful movements do not spring up for more green spaces, fewer rabbit-hutch apartments, more investment in local communities and a focus on mutual betterment over individual freedom.
The very possibility of a global shutdown-inducing pandemic was unthinkable a few weeks ago. Today, in the foothills of this crisis, the policy consequences are equally remote. But in time, we will likely look back on this as a generation-defining event, from which countless changes — many positive — sprung.