As new confirmed cases of the pandemic novel coronavirus disease surge in the U.S., intellectuals are looking into how the outbreak may bring changes to society in a fundamental way, and expose some of the underlying deficiencies in American political culture.

Among them is Thomas Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and columnist for the New York Times. In a recent weekly column, he penned a piece entitled "Our New Historical Divide: B.C. and A.C. – the World Before Corona and the World After."

Friedman, the man behind the best-selling book "The World is Flat," started the piece with his thinking on how the world has changed since he published the book about growing global interconnectedness in 2014. Connectivity exploded after that and now, come 2020, the virus has caused a global shutdown, partly as a result of that connectivity.

"We've now reached a point where all of our interlocking systems, each with their own feedback loops, are all shutting down in unpredictable ways," Bill Joy, the scientist who co-founded Sun Microsystems, said, as quoted by Friedman in the New York Times piece.

Global air travel has plummeted. Global supply chains have been disrupted. Hundreds of millions of people are in effective lockdown and national borders are closed.

Friedman went on to explain how the coronavirus pandemic exposes humans to the power of exponentials. The pandemic is shocking because this has always been one of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp. In hospitals around the world, doctors expressed their shock to see emergency rooms overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients in just a matter of days.

That is also why governments around the world must make sure that general hospitals and intensive care units have enough beds in the country to host critically ill coronavirus patients. New York City is already reported to be considering turning a convention center into a makeshift hospital as the virus further spreads.

But the power of exponentials can also be leveraged to help bring coronavirus treatment, wrote Friedman. Thanks to the advances in computer technology and synthetic biology, the detection and diagnosis of pathogens can be conducted at a much faster speed.

For example, since the technology used for sequencing has improved in the past few years, it took around a month for Chinese scientists to sequence the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus. In comparison, in 2003, it took them much longer to sequence the SARS virus genome. It peaked in February 2003 and the complete sequencing did not come out until April.

The coronavirus pandemic is also shaping American culture and politics in a fundamental way, Friedman added.

U.S. political culture can be defined as "loose," based on the degree it prioritizes rules over freedom. In comparison, countries like Singapore, China and Austria, have strong social norms and a low tolerance of deviant behaviors.

The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that tight societies can have the most effective response to COVID-19, he wrote in the piece, citing a professor of University of Maryland, Michele Gelfand, who first coined the term "loose cultures" and "tight cultures."

Deficiencies in White House coordination and reckless public figures also worsened the situation, Friedman noted. He named a few public figures who initially played down the risk of coronavirus, including White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow and conservative TV hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

The coronavirus threat, was initially portrayed as an overblown "hoax" by some conservative American pundits. Several Fox News hosts took the stance that the coronavirus was no worse than a flu, when figures showed that there were already thousands of people killed worldwide by the virus. 

They later changed their stance and acknowledged the seriousness of the coronavirus, mirroring President Trump's shift in tone on the issue. 

"Our loose cultural programming needs to do a big switch in the days to come," Freedman cites Gelfand as saying in the piece.

By March 20, Illinois, California, New York and Nevada had already strengthened their emergency measures in response to the escalation of the coronavirus pandemic, imposing restrictions on residents and businesses. All residents have been advised to stay home except for essential activities.

The solution to get out of the crisis, wrote Friedman, is more generous policies towards the most vulnerable. Measures to empower workers who are laid off or see their paychecks dwindle amid the economic shutdown are crucial. The Trump administration already revealed the outline of a one trillion U.S. dollar economic package this week for direct payments to taxpayers and loans for business.

"The more we simultaneously tighten our culture and loosen our purses, the stronger and kinder society we'll be after coronavirus," Friedman concluded.

The coronavirus pandemic forced many in Western countries to reconsider their approach to social governance. A pandemic at this scale requires state mobilization and state intervention, things that are likely to raise alarm in societies with loose social control.

"We have been stumbling, from crisis to crisis, toward an enhanced savior role for the state," wrote opinion columnist for Bloomberg Pankaj Mishra. Some unexpected calamities have challenged the dominant narrative of laissez faire. The September 11 terrorist attacks, the global financial crisis, and now the pandemic outbreak, have elevated the responsibility of government to maximize the welfare of citizens "into a life-or-death imperative", Mishra wrote. 

A global coronavirus pandemic that forces thousands of millions to stay confined at home is shaping the way people come to view the society and their government. That changing perception is likely to endure.