In the new post-viral economy, people must limit their exposure to germs from other people. So, all of the physical structures in our world that involve close contact between strangers must now, theoretically, be adapted to the new requirement.

Sports venues, theaters, restaurants, public transportation modalities that carry multiple people, transit stations, office and apartment high rise buildings, hotels, convention centers, all built under the economic principle of economies of scale, became obsolete overnight under traditional operational behaviors. The economics that made all of these activities profitable at scale no longer exist. *Poof* – the virus burst the proximity bubble we didn’t even know existed.

Humans adapt their environment. It’s what we do. This next adaptation is going to be major.

Now that health safety risk is an established concern, people will not re-engage with mass exposure environments unless the risk is mitigated.

Mitigation may come through immunity, inoculation, identification, protective devices, mutation of the virus, changing usage of social modalities to the extent they can remain profitable under new usage methods, and lastly, re-engineering the things that were built for mass usage and economies of scale into new forms that provide similar function with mitigated risk and are still profitable. We must discover and engineer for the new profitability mix.

Will applying a mask to every human face out in public be enough of a remedy to get people back into the seats? Doubtful. You can’t eat or drink through a mask. You can’t smile or frown through a mask.

Relying upon government to rebuild our social infrastructures to assure health safety in our proximity situations is, to use a medical metaphor, a prescription for disaster. Government does not have the creative reservoir to conceive of how best to adapt all of our social interactions and infrastructure, let alone the capacity to implement their typical one-size-fits-all types of solutions at a country-wide scale.

This is a job for the private sector. We have a massive economic recovery task ahead of us. This is the time for government to govern best by governing least – to get the regulations and the bureaucracies out of our way, to free private citizens, companies, corporations, etc. to solve this problem in the millions of ways that only they can discover and successfully implement.

Government can continue to play with their models and issue general guidance. Otherwise, we know about the problem, and we will figure out how to live with it.