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Editor's Note: Jamie Metzl is a technology and health futurist, member of the World Health Organization's international advisory committee on human genome editing, and author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity (paperback April 7). Follow him on Twitter @jamiemetzl The opinions expressed are his. See more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN) - Yes, like me, you have been receiving emails from most of the organizations you are involved with saying that classes, conferences, services and other planned events are now taking place online amid the crisis in the coronavirus has certainly noticed a trend.
With so many of us already connecting with our communities through social media and smartphones, we have already made great strides away from physical proximity as the core of our human intimacy. What we are now witnessing is a quantum leap towards virtualizing our lives.
In the coming weeks we will see more of this. It won't be just the Vatican Easter services and the US presidential debates that they take place without large audiences.
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As the virus spreads between populations, an increasing number of health professionals are also likely to become infected and need to be quarantined. With the number of patients rapidly increasing and decreasing available healthcare professionals, we will be forced to rely on telemedicine and artificial intelligence diagnostics to overcome this.
Companies like Amazon have been experimenting with ATM-free stores, but with human ATMs who can't get to work or who are concerned about touching products handled by others, this trend will accelerate.
Welcome to our disembodied future.
Our move away from physical connectivity since the days of the telegraph has expanded the breadth of our networks and has helped bring people together in new and meaningful ways, but it has also come at a cost. There's a reason why studies show that babies who don't get enough physical attention often have social and emotional issues later in life, and why we think of solitary isolation as punishment rather than cosmic Buddhist reward.
Our deep human need for intimate physical connectivity with others is encoded in our DNA. That deep social interconnectivity was fundamental to the competitive success of our ancestors.
Today, however, an estimated 28% of all American households are single-person households, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Almost 5% of the American population lives in nursing homes. More than 2 million Americans are incarcerated, according to a 2018 report by the Office of Justice Statistics.
This physical isolation translates into high rates of depression. A US national survey of 2018 found that nearly half of American adults sometimes or always feel alone. Research at Brigham Young University found that social isolation had the negative health impact equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
We need to promote social distancing, quarantine, and self-isolation to save lives. And we must restrict visits to places like our nursing homes and prisons to stop the spread of the coronavirus. But one consequence of this is that people will be pushed to even higher levels of social isolation.
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Just as the artificial intelligence revolution forces us to evaluate what work is most appropriate for humans, this sudden virtualization revolution will force us to redefine the foundations of our connectivity with others. We need to ask ourselves if our core need for physical human connectivity can be met at least in part in other ways. As we wisely embrace physical social distancing, we must simultaneously embrace virtual emotional closure.
Here are my seven essential steps we can take to do it:
We all hope that this crisis is only temporary and that our lives will return in a few months. This is certainly a possibility, but there is a real possibility that the crisis will last considerably longer.
Even if a vaccine can be developed and deployed by the end of next year, it is doubtful that our lives will return to exactly what they were before this crisis began. What we recently called normal was simply the new normal for people older than us. Our new virtualized normality of life is likely to become the normality of future generations.
Humans will always have a deep biological need for physical connectivity between us. That will not go away. Our new world of virtual fellowship will certainly come at a cost, but it also has the potential to bring us new gifts that we would never have imagined otherwise.
Since, at least for now, we don't have many options, let's make the most of this opportunity.
coronavirus