How Coronavirus Might Reshape Society

...

Medical historians and experts say humanity's past experiences with diseases have shaped the world we know today, from the way our cities are constructed to modern privacy laws and even the way people think about sex.

"Right now, our lives have changed 180 degrees. Today, I'd be in my office or teaching or doing something at the hospital," said Howard Markel, a physician and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. "This has been absolutely life changing, and the fact that we don't know how long we have to do it is also very problematic."

The coronavirus pandemic raging across the world has put billions of people on lockdown, sent millions of Americans to work from home, cost millions of people their jobs, shuttered bars and restaurants and parks, and canceled public events and school classes.

"These pandemics are not just interchangeable causes of death, but each one is experienced by society in a very different way," Frank Snowden, a historian at Yale and author of the 2019 book "Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present," said recently in a live chat with the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Some of those changes stem from new discoveries about how disease works.

...