I consider just how much we humans can actually slow down. We don't have the benefit of being able to hibernate.
For sure, there really is a huge deactivation of the economy, but it is also interesting to see the areas that have a shift / displacement to them; things that are being activated by this. I suppose we won't really know until further down the road.
Restaurants went down -- is their pickup / delivery meaningful? Did grocery pick up most of it? How much disappeared because people are being more dollar efficient at getting their meals? I don't know.
Lots of kinds of gathering people together for whatever reason, from a business meetings, to conferences, to church services, to just personal travel all had their own economy of how they operated that has been deactivated; now so much of that is pouring into video and audio conferencing (whose use is astronomically higher).
Some things in life are like squeezing a balloon -- it might not be happening the way it was, but it is happening some other way.
And one has to assume that if we could see the instantaneous costs for healthcare, I expect they've gone up because in some places they are operating at or above standard capacities. For sure healthcare and at least certain areas of medical research are very activated.
I just wonder what the longer term behavioral changes will be: are new ways of doing things being brought into so many people's lives that these new ways will become more mainstream even the other side of this situation we are in? And the flip side of that are new business ideas that address our current situation going to catch on and find a permanent place in the way things work from now on?
Are there things that because of interruption, people will just not consider as important even long term?
How will marketing / advertising deal with these things I wonder? I try not to be too cynical, but I think I'd be foolish if I didn't recognize the countless dollars that go into making small wants or artificial aspirations be converted into making people think they really need something. Will they be working to point things back as they were? Or is there some authentic concept about what is necessary / important that will linger in people?
I guess much of these will end up being about how bad it gets, how close to home it hits, and how long it lasts.