While trying to formulate a theory about what has happened, both to society and the economy, and what will be required to try to repair the situation, I thought of this:
Has our computer’s hard-drive crashed? Obviously the worst scenario possible and the most difficult to repair. Society literally has to be pulled apart and rebuilt from the ground up. Damage would correlate with the amount of time needed to replace the faulty drive (ie. time to make a vaccine/shore up Wall Street & Main Street). Perhaps a chip on the motherboard fried and it’s simply impossible to fix?
Instead, has the operating system crashed? Another truly awful scenario, which often involves things like having to reload drivers, third party software, updates to all. Within that scenario are the choices of trying to ‘’repair’’ the problem, or perform a clean reinstall which required reformatting the drive and losing all currently stored data in the process. No pun intended, perhaps the computers been infected with a virus? Perhaps the computer and operating system are working but an essential program isn’t and now requires a ‘’patch.’’
Even best-case scenario I expect society to be totally unrecognizable in comparison to the world as it was even a month ago. I’m in America and I fear it has been irreversibly altered, for the worse and I’m convinced most people are still in the denial phase. There will be loss of many businesses, people’s jobs, massive draw-down of all aspects of consumerism, whether shopping or travel, with service industries such as hotels, tourism, airlines, restaurants, theaters etc., all being pushed to the brink. That neighborhood restaurant you used to enjoy. Gone. That neighborhood watering hole. Shuttered, permanently and those you knew who worked there are, like mostly everyone, now in survival mode.
9/11 changed America for the worse (i.e. loss of civil liberties etc.), and I think that will feel like a walk in the park by comparison.