Ask HN: My brother is the director of Alaska VA and asked for help for this app

I've been pulling 18+ hour days working from home on our product so I haven't paid much attention to this, but looking at the exponential curve gives me the impression that this will change a many things, at least for some time.

One of the things that have crossed my mind is that the financial distress lived by people in easily terminated positions or who do low complexity tasks will lead their children to witness how fragile a livelihood can be. This is more obvious in some societies than others, but the scale at which this will happen true will etch this in memories and many will probably pledge not to go through what their parents went through. Some societies where someone can be out of a job and still live decently because they're someone's brother/sister/cousin/nephew and the safety net makes it hard to starve or freeze. This will cause a mutation.

The realization of what it is to be confined and not free of one's movement. I'm in my thirties but I know what a curfew is from more than a decade of terrorism and civil war. People who are just five years younger than me don't, and people in many countries find it crazy not to be able to go out after 1700 or 1900. This can make people more empathetic with people who need a good reason to go out, or people who simply can't. The disabled and the maimed, the bullied and the threatened, the outcast and the undesirable.

The realization you cannot intimidate or project strength with a virus for it doesn't care if you pull a knife, puff the chest, or command goose-stepping eukaryotes. It doesn't care that someone loves their mother or their child, if someone is a believer, spiritual, an optimist, or a pessimist. It doesn't care about how much someone bench-presses or how many beers one drinks.

This may not be a realization for many people, but a lot of people think that way. That being a badass, a wise-ass, or a dumbass somehow will prevent them from getting infected, and that loving their mom is enough to make things go well. This, too, will change things and will do most likely in painful ways.

This would also stress organizations, governmental or not, and require them to change and come up with ways to survive. For example, the dwindling tax money the revenue service is collecting because of the crisis could provoke an acceleration in electronic payment, and remove some bureaucracy.

Organizations such as ours are forced to learn to work completely remotely, and have message discipline and institutionalize knowledge. We are lucky we've been experimenting with this because we're paranoid enough to have thought that we needed to do it because at some point we'd have no choice but to do it so we're okay, but this could set a precedent in some organizations that eschew remote work with an opinion on productivity.

This may also be a rare occasions for some countries where corruption is high as government officials get tested, government gets changed, and officials simply have no other place to go. What happens in a lot of countries is that the people act as low quality tenants who'll completely ruin a property because they have no ownership and plan to move somewhere else. They can't really do that now, so they have to fix some things or suffer the consequences.

Writing these lines, I'm reminded of a passage in Blaise Pascal's "Pensées":

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantages which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

Sounds about right. The US is heading for a rough ride, which is made worse by a combination of lack of universal health care and sane coverage being tied to having an employer (or lack thereof of late). To say nothing of leadership (or, there too, lack thereof of late).

That said, the real stories will be sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries IMO, plus Brazil and India in all likelihood. I'm struggling to imagine Western countries doing the right thing and extending a couple of trillion dollars to poor countries before it completely gets out of hands over there, even though it would be the right thing to do. Short of that, there will be new waves, over and over, until we've a vaccine.