COVID-19 is not going to change the world forever, but it is going to change quite a few things, in some cases for a long time. Here's eight of them, in no particular order.
1. The clean air in China's cities in the past month, thanks to an almost total shutdown of the big sources of pollution, has saved 20 times as many Chinese lives as the new coronavirus has taken. (Air pollution kills about 1.1 million people in China every year.) People will remember this when the filthy air comes back, and want something done about it.
2. Online shopping was already slowly killing the retail shops. The lockdown will force tens of millions who rarely or never shop online to do it all the time. Once customers get used to shopping online, most of them won't go back, so retail jobs will be disappearing twice as fast.