
Covid-19, Civil Unrest Could Trigger Mass Migration in Post-Pandemic World - harambae
https://www.studyfinds.org/covid-19-civil-unrest-could-trigger-mass-migration-in-post-pandemic-world/
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dkdk8283
I lived in NYC for 10+ years and I’m so glad I left. You’re trapped. No
personal space. If the city closes bridges and tunnels you have no ability to
egress unless you want to break the law or rent a helicopter.

Now that I live in a rural area I can be self sufficient for a few weeks, I’m
armed, and my local neighborhood watches out for each other.

I feel completely safe where I’m at and I couldn’t imagine going back to
dense/city life.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
You clearly don't feel completely safe because you are armed and need a
neighborhood watch.

~~~
mailbag
I interpret it as being armed and the neighborhood watch are reasons for GPs
feeling of safety.

~~~
xiphias2
In the E.U. in any developed country if you are not in a bad neighbourhood,
the chances of dying in homicide is so low, that people are considered crazy
if they have a gun for ,,protecting themselves''.

I just went through a cancer blood test panel, which somewhat decreases my
chances of dying, but I never thought of buying a gun.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
The US isn't the EU. In rural US, police response times can be very long.
Where I grew up, it would take police 30 minutes to respond to an emergency
call. More rural areas can take longer. This combined with our distrust in
federal government and individualistic society means many of us are willing
and prepared to defend ourselves.

~~~
bigbugbag
The US seems to fare better. In rural EU there is simply no police to answer
an emergency outside office hours. Your call is routed to a station distant of
over a hundred kilometers, if they sent you their response team not only would
it arrive too late but then they'd have no one to send to local emergencies.
You're told to take pictures and to report to the closest station during
opening hours the next day.

Heck we even had art stealers removing a several tons statue that was
literally in front of that police station in the middle of the night, this
town bank ATMs where blasted so many times that the banks just stopped
replacing them.

It's been decades that everyone has stopped thinking that the governement
cares or would send help if anything happened.

But despite the local context being worse than in the US for much longer,
still there is no neighbourhood watch and the only people who have guns are
hunters and the idea of needing guns to defend ourselves is quite uncommon.

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downerending
It's a plausible idea. I already life in a relatively "safe" place, and yet I
find myself considering moving to an even "safer" shack in the remote woods
somewhere. Feels like a storm is coming...

~~~
closeparen
Given the medical nature of the storm, I’d really stay within a reasonable
drive of a proper hospital. A lot can happen on the helicopter ride to
civilization, and that’s assuming the system is healthy enough to offer you
one.

If things get really bad, humanitarian aid may or may not come for the cities,
but it’s _definitely_ not coming for a cabin in the woods. Are you prepared to
live off the land?

~~~
neilv
Good point about hospitals, and aid in general.

In a disaster affecting a large area (including adversely impacting aid from
outside one's area), rural people will have to be more self-sufficient than
city people, but they're also in a better position to be.

Rural strategic advantages I imagine include: lower cost of living, ability to
own rather than rent (lower risk of homelessness?), land to grow food and have
animals, space to store and build necessities, space for disease distancing,
trade with nearby farmers when city supply chains disrupted, more likely
culture of neighbors knowing each other and looking out for each other.

Some of my "college town" city-slicker disaster strategy (focused on economic,
natural disasters like hurricanes, industrial accidents, and bad actors)
didn't quite play out with Covid-19:

* Despite our money, we couldn't insulate sufficiently from catastrophically bad action by national leadership.

* One of our own big-money biotechs who should've known better actually created the initial superspreader event in Boston.

* The wildcard fact that we're nationally strategic (economic, prestige, and military tech) and also have students of much of the world's most wealthy and powerful here, didn't matter for external aid in this scenario. (Our governor even had to engage in cloak&dagger, to keep medical worker PPE we'd bought from being seized by national.) (And, though having the children of the wealthy&powerful here might be an asset for getting aid in local/regional disasters -- acknowledging the other side of how awful some disaster-hit _poor_ areas of the US have been treated in pre-Covid recent memory -- that mattered less when "outside" was also struggling and had no aid to give, and maybe wouldn't have mattered as much anyway, after the universities sent students home.)

And problems that were predictable, if one had been thinking of pandemic as a
likely near-term scenario:

* We're densely-packed, mostly in old apartments with quirks and problems, often with roommates, and relatively little open space.

* The substantial number of self-absorbed people accustomed to getting what they want doesn't help. For example, the several joggers who huffed&puffed past me on my own street's narrow sidewalk in the space of 10 minutes last week, only one even bothered to pull up a cloth mask as they passed. And generally only ~50% mask use rate among non-joggers on that same street last week, on a straight shot line between Harvard and MIT.

What so far _has_ played out here better than it might've, I suspect is due to
Cambridge and the Boston area having a lot of smart officials who care about
doing their jobs well, a wealth of medical personnel and resources, a
relatively progressive culture by US standards that resulted in a lot of
attention being focused on helping the less fortunate here, the fact that the
universities and colleges eventually told the students not to come back after
spring break debauchery-acclerated pandemic spreading, overall passable public
effort at distancing&masks, and a good amount of money to make that all
easier.

(That's not to say that there aren't already countless family tragedies
locally due to Covid, nor that unfathomable human misery around the world
hasn't been caused -- only that the local situation could've been even worse
already, if we didn't have some things in our favor.)

~~~
lsllc
For COVID19, MA has done terribly at 7576 deaths for a population of ~6.7M
[0]. At 1090 deaths per million, that's worse than the UK (620 deaths/millon)
and Belgium (843 deaths/million) [1]. MA is only eclipsed by NY (1570/1M), NJ
(1400/1M) and CT (1160/1M) [2].

It's not the joggers we need to worry about, it's the elderly/infirm (average
age of the dead is 81) and long term care home inhabitants (63% of deaths)
[0].

[0] [https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-
june-13-2020/dow...](https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-dashboard-
june-13-2020/download) [1]
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-
deat...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-
worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/) [2]
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-
covi...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-
covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/)

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pnako
I don't think it's going to be huge, but in France most people indeed fled
Paris. Perhaps this event has convinced many people that telecommuting
actually works, and we'll see a durable increase in people working from home,
and avoiding public transportation.

~~~
tluyben2
> most people indeed fled Paris

That seems ... implausible? Some people left yes, but not most surely...

~~~
tonyedgecombe
More than a million people according to phone data:

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-
paris-france-lockdown-one-million-orange-phone-data-a9429896.html)

Out of a population of 10 million so "most" is incorrect however it is a
surprisingly large number.

~~~
bigbugbag
You misinterpreted something here.

The phone data is partial data as it is from a single mobile phone networks
out of the four. It has been since updated to 2 out of the 4 (the other two
supposedly respect their customer privacy). These number are not about Paris,
which has a population of around 2 millions people, but for the whole
metropolitan area.

For the actual city of Paris 600 000 people left the city in a matter of days
in relation to the lockdown announcement, or about 27% of population.
[https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356](https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4477356)

