In this episode; society. Do we want to go back to our pre-Covid lives? Guyon is joined by Emily Mandel, Clementine Ford and Merepeka Raukawa-Tait.

Has the Covid-19 pandemic really changed the world forever? And if so, how? In the final episode of the After The Virus podcast, focused on society, Emily Mandel, Clementine Ford and Merepeka Raukawa-Tait tell Guyon Espiner their thoughts.

Watch the video version of the episode here

It was the sound of ambulance sirens that kept bringing Emily Mandel back to reality.

The Canadian novelist's home in Brooklyn, New York is near a hospital and during the month of April the sound of ambulances was constant.

"Any time you stopped to listen, you'd hear a siren. If you stayed up late enough or got up early enough, you'd see them pass by without sirens, just lights flashing down the street."

New York City has been one of the hotspots of the Covid-19 crisis, with more than 200,000 cases and over 21,000 deaths.

So, while for her family the lockdown that started in March has been "okay" - none of her circle of loved ones have died of Covid-19 and she has spent much of her time with her four-year-old daughter working on her rooftop garden "oasis" - the horror has still reached them.

"There is this awareness of death all around us."

Mandel is not the only panellist on the fourth episode of After The Virus who says the sounds of the pandemic got to her. Australian feminist thinker and writer Clementine Ford found it was ambulance sirens that affected her most in the first few weeks of the pandemic too.

"I had that wave of panic or the sense of something fundamental changing in our society."

Instead of looking for a return to normalcy, Ford believes societal change is coming and should be welcomed.

"I do have that sense of not wanting to go back to exactly the way things were. I think that there are opportunities here to see what kind of society we do want to shape."

Ford believes that some economic policies temporarily introduced because of the pandemic, such as housing the homeless, should be permanent.

"It's become very clear to us that the money has always been there to do these things, it was just a lack of political will."…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details