At the 2013 Global Health Summit in Beijing, China, 112 key individuals from governments, the private sector, international organizations, and other groups, met to discuss how the next 100 years of global health may look. The summit released a white paper, titled: Dreaming the Future of Health for the Next 100 Years, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
In a section of the report that detailed what the participants were relatively certain of, there is a description of life that has many similarities to what has transpired in response to Covid, including isolation and an increasingly virtual life:
“The abundance of data, digitally tracking and linking people may mean the ‘death of privacy’ and may replace physical interaction with transient, virtual connection, generating isolation and raising questions of how values are shaped in virtual networks… Education will undergo major transformation due to convergence of insights from cognitive psychology and new online tools (chunking, crowdsourcing, chatrooms, mass open online courses) creating learning spaces in the ‘many to many’ forms of peer to peer learning, outside formal classrooms” (p.8).
The report then moves on to hypothesize on four different scenarios that could take place in the future, under a section, titled: Waking Up in 2050. In Scenario 1, The Scramble for Health Resources, there is a dystopian depiction of what life may be like in January, 2050:
