(5) Although I feel the era of travel restrictions will vanish within months once it is a global pandemic, perhaps the severe economic effects of the whole thing will cause a massive drop in general travel that lasts for many months to years?
People have short memories. These "flu-like" outbreaks are concerning of course, but not that uncommon.
In mid-2009, we had the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic which lasted for around a year, until mid-2010. The number of confirmed deaths was 18,500, but some estimated the number to be as high as 575,400. Then we also have the H5N1 (bird flu) case.
For those of us who remember these times, the worldwide reaction was certainly much more subdued and people seemed much less concerned than with COVID-19. I think that this is one step on a worrying trend towards reactionary extremism that we see in today's society that's so clearly reflected in today's politics.
Much of it is because of the rise of 24/7 social media where we're just continually inundated with increasingly negative news stories, and of course, it's also due to the media's transition away from a subscription model to a "pay-per-click" model where they have to come up with increasingly controversial and sensationalist headlines to make people click on their articles and please their advertisers.
Anyway, I think that we're currently in a frenzy right now, which will shortly end when everyone's attention span wanes. Remember when we had the bushfires this summer and the entire news cycle was dominated by news of the fires? Those in fire affected regions (like myself) will know that the media stopped reporting on it long before the fires stopped burning - once people were bored of the stories, the reporting moved on.
My guess is that there will continue to be travel restrictions and bans to certain areas, but as the "novelty" of the entire situation wears off, people will just begin to go back to their normal lives. When people see that after a few months of sensationalist news, people are not just dropping dead around them, they'll see that a lot of the initial fears were not realised.
There's also a lot of hope that as most of the heavily infected areas in the northern hemisphere enter their hottest months, the number of cases will begin to fall, just like the flu. The bad news for us is that we're moving towards the colder months. I just hope that people will begin to calm down and assess the risks rationally. Most of the people who are worrying the most about dying from COVID-19 have no fears about dying in a traffic accident or an accidental fall (both of which are far more probable at the moment).
