There will be a before and after the coronavirus outbreak. The virus, which appeared two years ago in China, has caused many upheavals.
Tourism, health, work, education… The epidemic has caused changes in several areas and certain trends could prove to be lasting.
The air at half mast, but not forever
This was the first palpable effect of the health crisis. The two years of Covid-19 have brought a roller coaster of uncertainty, recovery hopes and cancellations for this sector. Year in and year out, more or less accepted standards, starting with the wearing of a mask and a health pass recognized throughout Europe, have enabled a large part of travel to resume. But companies have suffered billions of euros in losses. A return to normal is not expected until at best 2024 in trains or planes.
Global air traffic, cut by two-thirds in 2020, only reached half the level recorded in 2019 at the end of 2021, overwhelmed by the closure of a large part of Asia and, until November, of the United States . Internal or interregional lines, at around 79% of pre-crisis traffic, resisted better than intercontinental links (34%), victims of borders closed even before the Omicron wave.
In the long term, however, the sector remains optimistic, as evidenced by the well-filled order books at Airbus and Boeing: with the rise of the middle classes in Asia in particular, airlines even expect to welcome 10 billion passengers. per year in 2050 against 4.4 billion in 2019. In cities, public transport has seen its attendance collapse – for fear of contamination. There has been a noticeable boom in cycling – however quite limited in volume – and above all a strong return to the car.
Explosion and transformation of online sales
The Covid-19 epidemic and its share of confinements and administrative store closures has been a lasting accelerator of online sales. The eMarketer panelist, quoted by the French e-commerce Federation (Fevad), estimates that the share of products and services ordered on the Internet (excluding travel, event ticketing, catering services and gambling) had increased from 13 , 6% in 2019 to 18% of total sales in the world, weighing the trifle of 4.280 billion dollars.
Were the not so young reluctant? “We have observed the arrival of new, more senior customers who are now loyal,” said Gaëlle Le Floch, distribution specialist at Kantar. Certain product categories, hygiene or beauty, seemed less conducive to online sales? The players have adapted to offer the online fitting and invested in “beauty tech”.
The social life of consumers takes place more online than in front of the windows? According to consulting firm Accenture, $ 492 billion in sales have already been made through social networks in 2021, such as brands that slip between two Instagram posts, a figure that could climb to 1,200 billion in 2025. Nothing is wrong. seems to be able to stop this fundamental movement, which of course benefits Amazon, with its stunning financial results. He has also encouraged all his rivals to sell online, to the point that in France in 2020 for example, the sales of the American giant have grown less quickly than the market as a whole, according to Kantar.
Telework boom
The Covid crisis has generalized teleworking, even if rich countries have been able to use it more easily than others. According to forecasts by research firm Gartner, teleworkers will represent 32% of all employees worldwide by the end of 2021, up from 17% in 2019.
An OECD report published in September indicated that 47% of employees in France teleworked in 2020, an increase of more than 25 points in one year. In Japan, the rate of teleworking has increased from 10% to 28%. A lasting trend? Yes, answers the OECD: “Most companies and individuals expect to use telework more”, especially workers with a high level of qualification.
A multi-speed school
For Unesco, the global disruption in education caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is the worst educational crisis on record. Faced with the epidemic, the more or less long closure of schools or higher education has had dramatic consequences, particularly in low and middle-income countries. In this category, the share of children affected by learning poverty – from 53% before the pandemic – could potentially reach 70%.
Some regions of Brazil, Pakistan, rural India, South Africa and Mexico, among others, are experiencing substantial learning losses in mathematics and reading. In the long term, the generation of young people currently in school risks losing nearly $ 17 trillion in income due to deficiencies caused by the closures of establishments linked to the pandemic, warn the World Bank and agencies UN.
Rising hunger in the world
The Covid-19 pandemic will have long-term effects on world food security, after contributing in 2020 to a surge in the number of people facing hunger, warned the United Nations specialized agency FAO. This worsening of hunger in the world (+ 18% last year over one year), the largest for at least 15 years, compromises more than ever the objective set by the UN to eradicate it by 2030 The Covid-19 threw 20 million people into extreme poverty during the year 2021, underlines the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). It has also plunged many health systems into chaos, with a deleterious effect on the fight against other scourges such as HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. This year, 23 million children were unable to receive basic vaccines.