More WFH and Traffic

More about the effect of pandemic-based WFH on traffic patterns, and speculation regarding whether the changes are permanent.

Wejo is an outfit that is "reimagining the world we live in with connected vehicle data."  The fact that "connected vehicle data" sounds like something I'd really like to know a lot more about tells you all you need to know about me.

USA Today summarizes* some of Wejo's recent reporting on rush hour:

While Americans are gradually getting back to some semblance of normal, traffic data suggests that the morning drive has changed drastically – and it may never go back to pre-COVID-19 patterns.

In short, rush-hour traffic is more spread out and, generally, has shifted later in the morning as Americans are more able to avoid heavy traffic periods due to remote work...

To be sure, as the pandemic continues to subside, many Americans are expected to return to the office after Labor Day, likely increasing overall traffic volumes. But traffic experts expect that increasingly flexible work arrangements are likely to give many Americans the ability to avoid the old-fashioned blitz to the workplace altogether.

“The morning rush hour has gotten later and it’s gotten flatter,” says Daniel Tibble, director of data science and analytics for Wejo. “In almost all scenarios, traffic is not dropping as much in the later hours and is dropping more in the earlier hours.”

So rush hour seems to be changing, and for the good:  "flatter" means spread out, reducing congestion.

Whether this is permanent depends on the Great WFH Debate:  will there be a significant increase in people working from home after the pandemic is over (whatever "over" means)?  There will be impacts well beyond traffic:  commercial real estate and associated restaurants and other businesses; car and especially gas sales; family dynamics; population density (what happens when suddenly a whole lot of people can live wherever they want?), and etcetera.

Labor Day seems to be the point on the calendar when many businesses will be expecting their WFH staff to be coming back, so we've got a couple of months to see what happens.  Should be interesting.

 

 * - Poorly.

It's Not Over

We share our time between homes in rural New York and rural Massachusetts.  When we congregate, it is always with people who are vaccinated.  So for us, it would be very easy to slip into a post-pandemic lifestyle, to assume our place in a new world that is very much like the old one.

We also read the news, and it is often jarring, here in our healthy havens.

• There were "record numbers of infections in Australia and South Korea" this week.  Record numbers.
• Each day for the last three days, Thailand broke the record for COVID deaths.
• Indonesia has reported record numbers of cases on seven of the last eleven days.  On Thursday, a record number of Indonesians died.  A year ago, Business Wire noted that only 5% of Indonesian hospital beds are equipped to provide intensive care services.
• Vast numbers of Australians who were caught overseas when the pandemic struck are still not home, and may not get home for a long time:  Australia is tightening its lockdown, and fewer people - any people - will be allowed in the country going forward.  Believe it or not, only 8% of Australians are vaccinated.
• Each of the last four days, The Moscow Times reported a new daily record for Russians dying from COVID.
• The Euro 2020 soccer championships look like they will be super spreader events.  40% of Finland's cases are apparently traceable to soccer fans returning from games in Russia.
• And here in America, 273 people died of COVID yesterday.  Yesterday.  On that same day, 14,875 Americans learned that they had COVID.  Twenty percent of them had the delta variant.  In the UK, 39,438 Britons learned they had COVID, and nearly all of them - 92.3% - have the delta variant.
• Also in America:  You've heard of the variants, and especially the delta variant, and you've heard of anti-vaxxers.  Those two things tend more and more to be found together:  hotspots.  The Federal Government is sending mobile vaccination labs to those hotspots, because the pandemic isn't over.

The pandemic isn't over.  That land we thought we saw, or saw evidence of?  It was mangled by marauders and wiped clean by hurricanes and no longer exists.  Just branches and leaves in the water.  The birds seem confused.  We're caught in a storm, and the compass was swept overboard.

It's not over.  The new world is nowhere to be seen.

Colds in The New World

I got a COVID test this morning, because - the new world.

I have, throughout my long life, gotten a cold maybe once every year or two.  Nothing unusual:  it comes; you deal with it; it goes.  Never thought of missing work or sending out notifications.

I've had a persistent cough for a month or so which feels exactly like an old fashioned cold.  In the last few days, the cough has gotten more persistent.  Nothing new.  Except how I felt I had to handle it.

First, I called the doctor's office, because, for the first time ever, I wanted to know what it was.  Still waiting to hear, so no joy there.

I have one remaining post-post-retirement job, which involves working with a small group of colleagues at a historic mansion north of Cooperstown and leading tours of the mansion.  I certainly didn't want to spend the day coughing all over everyone, and watching folks edge away from me all day, even if I did exercise good cough discipline ("Cough into your elbow!" says my wife who worked with preschoolers for fifteen years).

So this morning I got a COVID test.  Because I have a cold.  The test came back negative.  I e-mailed everyone who works with me and outlined the plan, which is:  I'll go to work tomorrow and wear a mask all day.  At the beginning of each tour, I'll let the guests know that I have a cold and, by the way, tested negative yesterday.  I have the proof, printed out, in my pocket, if anyone would like to see it.  Then we'll start the tour.

If COVID really does become endemic (thanks, anti-vaxxers!), this may be the way we handle colds in the new world.  

In Which I Almost Disagree With a Blogger Whom I Admire

 Kevin Drum is at it again.  To wit:

And while we're on the topic, can we please, once and for all, give up on the "COVID has changed life forever" genre? It hasn't. It's already obvious that things will return almost completely to normal over the next few months and that the experience of living through a pandemic has neither enriched our lives nor taught us to cherish our friends and neighbors even more. All it's done is make us cranky.

Thanks again.  If Kevin's right, this whole blog has been a waste of time, sort of.  That's not his fault, of course, but... sheesh.

"And while we're on the topic..."  What topic?  This apocolyptic quote comes from a post describing the changes in traffic speed on the northbound 405 freeway which runs near his house in Irvine, Orange County, outside of Los Angeles, California.  Lower speeds are bad, because that indicates traffic jams.  Speeds improved during the pandemic which, I suppose, is over in California.  Now Kevin notes that they're back to normal:

Looks to me like the traffic jams are two hours shorter now than in June of 2019.  Maybe the pandemic isn't over in California?  Or maybe....  Nah.   Never mind.  It can't possibly be that even one person who was commuting to an office in 2019 might have found a way to work from home permanently - and therefore no longer contributes to traffic on the 405.  Couldn't be.

'Loss Of Grey Matter' Is Probably a Bad Thing

For some reason, an outfit called BioBank scanned over 40,000 brains in the three years previous to the outbreak of the pandemic.  There's a story there somewhere, but not that I could find, even though I looked hard.

At any rate, some clinicians in the UK recently reported on a study wherein they re-scanned 394 of those folks, all of whom had contracted and survived COVID-19, and compared the before and after.  They also compared the re-scans to 388 previously-scanned subjects who did not contract COVID-19.

Guess what?  Yep.  "We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter..."  Most of the brain cell loss was in the "gustatory and olfactory" regions - the parts of the brain that control the sense of smell and the sense of taste.  They also found "loss of grey matter" in other areas of the brain.

The neurologists found little difference between the effects of mild and severe cases of COVID.  So if I'm reading this correctly, a consequence of being infected with the virus is a loss of brain cells.  Not a cute inability to smell or taste for a couple of days, but permanently dead brain cells - which are famously unable to reproduce themselves, and so when you lose them, they stay lost.

Around the world, about 164 million people have gotten, and survived, COVID-19 up to this point.  If this study is accurate (and, of course, "more research needs to be done," etc., etc.), hundreds of millions of people will emerge from this pandemic with permanent brain injury.  The effects apparently range from severe to mild, and it's "only" in the taste and smell centers, but - permanent brain damage.

This is a blog about the new world - what it might be like - and so we need to acknowledge that this is one of the things that the new world might be like.  But I think we also have an opportunity to say, again, "Don't get it."  It's not a joke, a hoax, a mere inconvenience.  Stay safe.  Get vaccinated. 

Geez.

A Coupla Things

A couple of things that would not, on their own, merit a post.  Not because they're not interesting; I think if they were verifiable and included lots of data and numbers, they'd stand alone.  As it is, they're anecdotal.  So - grain of salt.

But more importantly, both stories suggest that the pandemic has nudged some of us a little bit toward what Maslow calls self-actualization - the fulfillment of our potential and our satisfaction with who we are.  But I'll let you be the judge.

First, to follow up on the previous post, regarding jobs and businesses.  Axios summarizes a survey by Prudential Financial that suggests that as many as one quarter of the workforce will be looking for a new job once the economy settles down and employment becomes less risky.  The World Economic Forum tells us that "up to 40% of employees are thinking of quitting their jobs."  Why?

• Some workers may believe they need to change jobs to get a better grip on work-life balance or find a place where they feel more connected.
• Nearly half of employees surveyed by Prudential said they feel disconnected to their companies after a year of working remotely, partly because they are missing the benefits of interacting with people outside their teams and getting "face time" with higher-ups in the office. This "culture decay" can lead people to be more likely to hop to a new employer.

A year or more away from the focused stress of the office has been revealing to many.  

"University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson tells Axios, "People have had a little more space to ask themselves, 'Is this really what I want to be doing?'" So some are deciding they want to work fewer hours or with more flexibility to create more time for family or hobbies."

Imagine that.  When people had no choice but to balance life, family and work, many of them kind of liked it.  Who could have predicted that?  Many don't want to work for a company which forbids WFH; over 80% in the Prudential study said they would prefer to be able to work from home at least one day a week.  For more reading, the World Economic Forum article goes down some interesting rabbit holes.

Secondly:  You may remember the post on hair.  At that point (oh, the innocence!), July 2020, we thought the pandemic was waning and things were opening up (very prematurely, as it turns out).  Men whose haircut-every-two-weeks-forever routine had been disrupted, were getting haircuts again, after months of not doing so.  And some were liking the long look, and deciding to keep it.

In a footnote at the end I noted, "I have no idea how this plays out for women in hair salons."  Well, now I do.

In a strangely moving, and beautifully photographed article in The New Yorker, we meet a dozen or so women who have been coloring their hair since the first grey appeared - and then, during the last year, with stylists and beauty parlors out of business, the grey grew in.  And they liked it.

I say it was moving because I have a sense of what grey hair can mean to a woman's self-concept, from conversations overheard during a long life.  These women have chosen to embrace it - to acknowledge greying and the aging it represents - many with a palpable sense of joy.  See that in the mirror?  That's me!  Me!  

An 80 year old woman who had never shown her grey says,

“When I did have a hairdresser to cut my hair, she said, ‘Don’t you want to do the color?’ I said, ‘Finished. No more.’ I’m very happy.”

"I'm very happy."  And that's your good news for the day.

Good News, of a Sort

Blogger, which cradles this blog in its digital bosom, has a pretty good search function, as long as you use just one word - no phrases.  Last I looked, there have been 185 "The New World" posts, and no, I am not going to read each one.  I use the search bar (upper left - try it!  It's fun!).  I've been able to find what I needed - up until today.  

I recently came across an article about the number of businesses that have closed permanently because of the pandemic.  I know I wrote a post on that very topic last year.  There were numbers.  But I can't find it, so I can't do any comparison.  You're free to search for it yourself, and if you find it, could you let me know?

Anyway, the Business Insider tells us that in a normal year (i.e.: not 2020) about 600,000 businesses close permanently in the US (and I had to look elsewhere to find that about the same number of business are created in the same time period).  However, in this non-normal year-and-change, an extra 200,000 businesses - above and beyond the normal 600,000 - have closed, never to open again.

This is actually a good thing, according to the Federal Reserve, who provided the numbers.  Projections had actually been much higher, but government aid, including the PPP, has apparently made a big difference.  

Two hundred thousand is a big number, and represents many more jobs.  More math, more turmoil in people's lives.  But overall, not a huge effect on the economy, especially if we can stop dithering on the infrastructure bill and just pass it already.

I'm not going to wander into politics; economics is close enough.  I'm starting to think that the mice are right - by the end of the year (that long?) we'll all be back to normal, and the pandemic will begin to slide into memory and myth.