What would the world of COVID-19 be like if there were no internet access?

What if there were no online world, what would the COVID-19 world be like?

Friday, May 22, 2020

Never before has the importance of virtual reality been so evident.

We live online for literally everything. I believe that it's only not yet possible to generate human beings online, but it shouldn't be long now.

COVID-19 confined companies to a new era, which became almost exclusively dependent on online platforms for meetings, sales, payments, events, training, presentations, and thousands of other forms of teleworking that suddenly became feasible because there is no other alternative. Without online, we would all be locked in our homes, waiting for time to pass, or else we wouldn't be confined to our homes, and the death toll would rise exponentially.

But it wasn't only in companies that online became indispensable. During lockdown, virtual reality made it possible to establish family and social relationships such as birthday parties, dinners, meetings with friends, religious ceremonies and cultural events, and even group shopping, medical consultations, trips, gym classes and romantic encounters.

You might say that all of this already existed before. True, but it was underutilized because the alternatives overlapped. Suddenly, the online world gained a universal dimension it had never had before.

This morning, while reading the Jervis clipping, I realized that several of our clients are developing online initiatives that were unthinkable two months ago:

AEP is organizing virtual business missions to Latin America;

The Portuguese Film Academy proposes to organize the 2020 Sophia Awards in an online format;

The Travel Fair is considering a new online model for the 2020 edition;

Thailand's Tourism Board and Dubai's Tourism Board are betting on webinars and online training instead of the usual face-to-face meetings;

Portugal Sou Eu is preparing to launch a strong online campaign to promote the consumption of Portuguese products;

Some of our clients took advantage of the lockdown to conduct online media training sessions;

Journalists are opting for virtual interviews with prestigious public figures, something that would have been unthinkable two months ago.

And I could go on and on because fortunately we have no shortage of work…

Suddenly our entire lives have come to depend exclusively on a seemingly insignificant little box, weighing no more than a kilo, but which allows us to move around the world at a dizzying speed. It's impressive!

Charles Babbage and Alan Turing, who invented the computer, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin who launched the project that would lead to the founding of Google, or more recently the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of this world, who popularized the use of the virtual world, perhaps did not imagine the magnitude of their "discoveries".

The healthcare professionals and scientists who are on the front lines fighting this cursed disease called COVID-19 are certainly heroes, but these men who invented a way for the planet to keep spinning in the context of near-total lockdown are no less so. Thank you for what you have given us!

Rosário Louro

Director-General