Unexpected Potential Aftermath of the Corona Crisis

No-one knows when the Corona crisis will end. Odds are, it will end in bits and pieces, with regions and countries deemed safe restoring activity within boundaries and suspiciously filtering incomers, quarantining or testing them to avoid a resurgence of the epidemic within their perimeter.

Though that is true for physical travels, virtual communication suffers no such limitations, as computers are immune to human viruses.

The longer the crisis continues, the more profound the effect of migrating a large part of the workforce to remote working and the education system to virtual teaching will be.

##1. On Real Estate

Once people and businesses adapt to remote working, and proximity to reputable schools is mitigated by the option to complement education online, the advantage of living in expensive, crowded, and polluted megacities will diminish.
The effect on rural exodus might well be that urbanites with "remotable" jobs could seize the opportunity to lower their living expenses while expanding their living space by moving into broadband-connected rural areas.
A similar tendency might be seen in parents who had moved closer to "good school" at the cost of higher rent, smaller living space, and more limited access to natural expanses.
Thus, we might see an inverted rural exodus and the mantra "Location, Location, Location" that powers the current real estate prices might very well take on a very different meaning.

##2. On Education

As virtual education develops, physical proximity to centers of learning will lose its primordiality. We might see the emergence of an educational parallel to work-spaces such as WeWork, where teens will go to take their online classes while benefiting from the company of nearby teens.
The role of teachers would switch from being the ones imparting knowledge to being the ones managing human relationships between students.
The end of the Corona crisis might upend the entire concept of schooling.

##3. On Brain Development

Aside from the diminished effect of physical proximity to schools, the association between screen time and fun time that currently plagues an entire generation might turn into a reluctance to spent time on the screen now used for boring school time.
When paired with the inverted rural exodus mentioned above, children who moved to more rural areas may well rediscover the pleasures of meeting friends face to face and use their hands to play with sticks and muds as previous generations did.
The adverse effects of excessive screentime such as excessive weight gain, sleep duration and quality, increased depression and anxiety disorder risks are not the only ones.
A more pervasive and less known effect is the disturbance of the vestibular system. Linked with the visual system, the vestibular system is critical to maintaining the balance between the body and the brain. A visual system overstimulated by the fast pace of computer games, Tik Tok video clips in rapid succession, etc. overloads the vestibular system, which leads to an alternance of emotional outbursts and apathetic intervals.
Recalibrating the brain balance with activities in natural light and interacting with a natural environment prevents long term damages to the brain's ability to perform optimally and to see the big picture.
As a result, children who benefit from a healthy combination of high-quality long-distance learning with regular interaction with nature and peers will outpace their urbanite peers glued to screens due to lack of access to outside activities.

These are all fairly wild extrapolations, but what else is there to do during a lockdown?