Before the pandemic began, the systems that govern our world were brittle. Today, they are broken. When we emerge, the world will be different, and so will we.

Editors' note: This story has been updated to more clearly attribute phrasing from work previously published in CNBC and Vice.



I ruined the mood in a family group chat last week. Someone shared a meme that read, “This #Coronavirus is turning me into a democrat. I’m staying at home, not working, complaining about everything, and waiting for a check from the government.”

Another family member used the yearly death rate of the flu to dismiss concerns over the coronavirus. Then someone else argued that millions of people die around the world every year in car accidents. “Will cars be banned,” they snarkily asked. I tried not to react emotionally, but it’s hard to keep your cool after weeks of trying to convince older relatives every day to stay inside and socially distance. “We’re currently at half as many American coronavirus deaths as the number of people who died on 9/11,” I replied, using the only statistic I’ve found that communicates the kind of world-changing loss that this pandemic will cause. “If Dr. Fauci’s projections are correct, it will be the equivalent of 30–60 9/11s.” The chat went quiet for a while after that. The numbers I was referring to have quickly gone out of date — they’re much higher now. But comparing this pandemic to other mass casualty, world-shaping events is the only way I know to make them resonate. As of this week, more than 5,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus — more than the 2,977 who died on September 11, 2001. More than any other event in my life, 9/11 changed the world: inspiring national security policies like the Patriot Act, jump-starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the latter of which has become the longest-running war in US history — and leading to the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security, effectively militarizing the United States’ borders and immigration services. On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, optimistically, if we continue practicing social distancing, between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans would die of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Projections are always bounded by inaccuracies (and there have been plenty in the past few months) — but if Fauci were correct, the death toll would be as if there were a 9/11 attack every day for the next two to three months. My grandmother was born in 1928; she spent the first 10 years of her life living through the Great Depression in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and the last five years of her life hoarding food until it rotted in her fridge and pantry. The trauma never left. Neither will the trauma of thousands upon thousands of deaths once it’s safe to leave our homes. When we emerge, we will be different people in a different world.

Noel Celis / Getty Images A child wearing a face mask looks over a barricade in Wuhan, China, April 2. Rows of plastic barriers prevented movement throughout the city while it was under total lockdown.

“The Authoritarian Creep” If China’s claim to have won supremacy over the virus is to be believed, the country was able to make up for a botched early response by mobilizing its vast and intricate surveillance infrastructure to carry out an authoritarian crackdown, the terrifying scale of which is only matched by the terrifying fear among Western liberals that it was necessary. Payment apps like Alipay and WeChat installed software to track users' movements. China’s state-run telecom color-coded users’ phones in red, green, and yellow, based on their risk of possible infection — which were then checked by guards at train stations. Those who broke quarantine were reported to the police. Chinese social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat were heavily censored to quell conspiracy theories and rumors. Those efforts may be working. The country is reporting that its case numbers are decreasing, and it has banned virtually all foreigners from entering the country as it attempts to return to normal without a second spike. Yet it’s hard to know exactly how real the claims are that China has flattened its curve. Three US officials told Bloomberg on Wednesday that the US intelligence community had concluded China’s numbers are actually much higher than what’s been reported. But with the US and Europe struggling to contain the outbreak, analysts have started asking whether China will emerge from this pandemic as the new global superpower. Jeremy Lee Wallace, a Cornell professor and leader of the university’s China's Cities research group, told BuzzFeed News the country is definitely attempting to position itself as a new global leader amid the pandemic. “[China] styled itself a leader in climate change and international trade following the election of Donald Trump and is proudly boasting of its successes in fighting COVID-19,” Wallace said. “Whether it will work depends on the outcomes in other countries and how those outcomes are perceived.” Presenting itself as a responsible custodian is now central to the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda strategy. Chinese diplomats and state media outlets are sparring directly with President Donald Trump’s own ad hoc online army on platforms like Twitter and YouTube, criticizing the US for its inability to mitigate the damage of the outbreak. Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire cofounder of the multinational tech company Alibaba Group, recently tweeted two photos of medical supplies being loaded onto a China Cargo Airlines flight. “The first shipment of masks and coronavirus test kits to the US is taking off from Shanghai. All the best to our friends in America,” Ma wrote. According to the Jack Ma Foundation, the shipment contained 500,000 testing kits and 1 million masks. Ma’s foundations have already claimed to have shipped 1.8 million masks and 100,000 test kits to other heavily affected countries. Chinese state media is very aware it’s a Chinese billionaire shipping tests and masks around the world, not an American one. “China has shared its experience, but many Western countries are just not willing to follow. When the pandemic is over, these countries will find that it was not China that had led to the severe conditions in the US and Europe, but their own wrong judgments and choices,” the Global Times wrote Wednesday. David Jacobson, professor of global business strategy at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told BuzzFeed News he worries China’s test-and-mask diplomacy could fall apart, citing reports of European countries sending back faulty equipment. “In the world of the Communist Party state propaganda, which is probably the most powerful arm right now because it's trying to globally set the narrative of how China's viewed, they're saying, ‘We're here to help, we learned all these lessons, and we're here to help the world.’” he said. Jacobson said he’s optimistic that countries will see through the spin. “The world is seeing the sham,” he said. “If the tests don't work, test diplomacy doesn't work.” But it’s not just in an ascendant China — an authoritarian COVID-19 creep is on the rise everywhere. NPR called semi-authoritarian city-state Singapore a “coronavirus model.” The country flattened its curve by setting up early proactive measures like a virus-fighting task force, strict hospital and home quarantines, and a ban on large gatherings. It also used a technique called contact tracing, building a movement log of the infected through surveillance footage, digital signatures left by ATM card withdrawals or credit card payments, and a Bluetooth-tracking smartphone app called TraceTogether. The European Union now has its first dictatorship. On Monday, the Hungarian Parliament passed a bill giving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the right to rule by decree indefinitely, establishing a COVID-19 state of emergency without a time limit, suspending both Parliament and elections, and instituting prison time for spreading “fake news” or rumors. Countries like Israel, Italy, and Austria are working with their telecommunications networks to use anonymized location data to track people in infection hot spots and monitor if citizens are breaking stay-in-place orders. Russia is using its massive 170,000-camera facial recognition system to catch people who violate quarantine and self-isolation. Hong Kong has deployed electronic bracelets for those who test positive for the virus. Turkmenistan’s state-controlled media outlets are no longer allowed to use the word “coronavirus,” and it has been removed from health information brochures. India has been particularly aggressive about containing the pandemic and tracking the infected. The country has experimented with stamping people who have been infected with ink that doesn’t wash off for weeks. The Indian central government is seeking a ruling from the country’s Supreme Court that would force all media outlets to receive approval to print, publish, or telecast content about COVID-19. And in the country’s southern state of Karnataka, quarantined people are now required to download an app on their phones, through which they must take and send a selfie — which includes GPS coordinates in its metadata — every hour to government officials. US companies like Facebook and Google are discussing how to track infection hot spots using anonymized location data, while American leaders are asking if the coronavirus is the kind of emergency that requires setting aside privacy and civil liberties.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images A pigeon crosses an empty Powell Street during the coronavirus pandemic in San Francisco, March 30.

“A Greater Depression” The immediate effects of the pandemic — postponed weddings, canceled vacations, empty supermarket shelves, sinking housing prices, salary cuts, layoffs — suggest no one will come out of this period without losing something. But we are only at the beginning. Predicting how bad things will get economically is difficult. A viral outbreak of this scale has only happened once before in the industrialized world: the 1918 influenza pandemic that hit the world in two seasonal waves, killing 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in the US. That pandemic occurred during World War I, which makes it hard to compare to now, even setting aside all the other changes in the past century. But according to a 2007 research paper on the economic effects of the 1918 pandemic, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the economic effects of the outbreak only lasted for a short time. “Many businesses, especially those in the service and entertainment industries, suffered double-digit losses in revenue,” the paper read. “Society as a whole recovered from the 1918 influenza quickly, but individuals who were affected by the influenza had their lives changed forever. Given our highly mobile and connected society, any future influenza pandemic is likely to be more severe in its reach, and perhaps in its virulence.” While the 1918 pandemic isn’t a perfect comparison to the modern coronavirus pandemic, Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, told BuzzFeed News that last century's outbreak exacerbated national problems that were already building up. “The 1918 flu was part of a broader wave of disruptions and crises that rocked America. The spike in unemployment and inflation after World War I, the 1919 ‘bloody summer’ of race riots, major labor strikes that fall, the First Red Scare that winter,” Kruse said. “There was such a national sense of unease and uncertainty.” Two months into this current outbreak, massive layoffs have started, American industries have demanded bailouts, and unemployment rates have surged. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis are projecting total employment reductions of 47 million — an unemployment rate of 32.1%. According to Forbes, every sector of the American economy is shrinking: Hotel chain Marriott International is furloughing tens of thousands of workers, Landry’s, the parent company of Del Frisco’s and Bubba Gump Shrimp, laid off 40,000 workers. Air Canada plans to lay off 5,100 members of its cabin crew. Shoe retailer DSW put 80% of its workers on a temporary unpaid leave of absence. The US news industry’s advertising spending is in free fall. Digital outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice have already announced salary cuts, and the mass media company Gannett — which owns titles like USA Today, the Arizona Republic, and the Des Moines Register — announced many staffers will be furloughed for five days a month through June. The news media may receive low-interest loans, but airlines will receive nearly $60 billion in financial assistance as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which Trump signed into law last Friday, but there are already questions from industry leaders about whether that’s enough to keep the industry aloft. Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and cohost of the podcast Capitalisn’t, told BuzzFeed News that we don’t know yet how effective the CARES Act will be but added it wasn't targeted at the right industries. “I see this as purely an electoral move, which is not justified from an economic point of view,” he said. “The goal of the package is to redistribute and preserve the existing production capacity of the US economy.” He said one immediate issue is that no one knows how it will help gig workers, which make up about 7% of the country’s total employment. “My understanding is basically nobody knows,” he said. “Imagine I work as a cab driver and through this program I get paid my regular wage, but I work as an Uber driver and I get nothing.” American workers are already reacting to this economic downturn, striking and protesting. More fundamentally, the way we understand labor and class in this country is changing more than it has since the Great Depression.

People are shown in social-distancing boxes at a temporary homeless shelter set up in a parking lot in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ethan Miller/Getty Images Rooms for patients are set up at Jacob Javits Convention Center, which is being used as a temporary hospital. Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images

Nurphoto / Getty Images A student attends an online class at home in New York City after schools closed amid the coronavirus pandemic, March 24.

Andrew Caballero-reynolds / Getty Images Neighbors of cellist Jodi Beder practice social distancing and watch her perform a daily concert on her front porch in Mount Rainier, Maryland, March 30.

“We Live Online Now” Right now, for one of the first times in modern history, huge swaths of the Earth’s population are being told to stay indoors. Workers who can conduct business remotely are. Group videoconferencing platforms like Zoom and Houseparty have blossomed. We spend our days switching back and forth between different inboxes, emails, family group chats, Slack messages, WhatsApp groups, and Instagram DMs — the bad screen and the good screen are now the same screen. There is a strong possibility we will not suddenly revert back to full offices when the world turns back on. Christopher McKnight Nichols, history professor and director of the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University, told BuzzFeed News that the 1918 pandemic’s biggest impact on American media was how seriously the press began to take public trust following the outbreak. “The lessons learned were largely about [news] coverage when the federal government is suppressing honest, open speech,” Nichols said. “There were rampant false cures and treatments peddled by large firms as well as those who could best be understood as charlatans. Attempting to crack down on advertising of some of this false medicine was a result.” This wave of mistrust is happening now as well. Except — contrary to the countless pieces fretting about an end to globalization, which cite the general breakdown in the rule-based global order and the deteriorating relationship between the US and China — we’re combating misinformation on a global scale we’ve never seen before. As the pandemic left China, an unverified video of a Chinese nurse overreporting the virus’s death toll spread from Chinese messaging platform WeChat to Twitter, where it was subtitled in English and then shared in huge numbers on YouTube. The same hoax about helicopters being used to disinfect cities was spotted in Italy, the Netherlands, the US, Turkey, and Argentina by fact-checkers. (While in Mumbai, workers really were being sprayed with an unknown chemical disinfectant.) Twitter's US-based moderation team took down two of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's tweets on Sunday for promoting the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which Trump has touted as a possible COVID-19 cure. By removing the ability to meet in person, by shuttering traditional entertainment, and because we are facing an increasingly undeniable and inescapable existential terror, the internet has become a global monoculture. But it’s not all hoaxes and conspiracy theories. The two most viral songs about the coronavirus outbreak are from Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. We go online to commiserate about whatever’s on Netflix (even if it’s a seven-part docuseries about a gay zookeeper who was arrested for murder-for-hire) or argue with each other about whether New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is hot (or has nipple piercings). This is not totally different to how we lived before — except there’s nothing else now.

Mario Tama / Getty Images Restrictions are listed for those who want to donate blood during a blood drive at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library amid the coronavirus pandemic in Yorba Linda, California, March 30.