From the NY Times Coronavirus Newsletter for March 12th:

Jonathan Wolfe: So you said we might return to something close to normal in May, but when do you think we’ll be back to 2019 levels of normal?

Ezra Klein: I have an exchange in my latest podcast with Dr. Ashish Jha, a health policy researcher at the Brown University School of Public Health, where he says something like there’s no going back to 2019 normal. And I’ve heard something like that a lot. But I think there are two versions of “things will never go back to 2019 normal” that people mean. There’s one version where what people are saying is it’s never going to be safe to do certain things again. And that doesn’t seem true.

EZ: On the other hand, as Dr. Jha says, pandemics change societies. So I think remote work is going to be more common. He was saying that he thinks there will be fewer 500-person lecture halls. It may take a long time for people to feel comfortable with activities that have once again become safe — there will be trauma and PTSD on a societal level from all this. So there may be social reverberations from this that may last longer than people think. That said, they also may not. I always think people underestimate the human animal’s ability to adapt and to snap back to an equilibrium.

I've never really understood the "never go back to 2019 normal" stuff either. Of course we're going back to normal, and quickly. For better and mostly worse, you couldn't stop a snap back to normal with a black plague.

Many are already back to normal and have been for months, against, I believe, any critical thinker's better judgement. Why in heaven's name would you eat indoors at a restaurant now? The risk/reward ratio is so high, and not just to you but everyone in your community. I mean, one Sunday morning I drove past a brunch place in town and it was jam packed. You couldn't tell we were, as a society, in pandemic mode.

We're so eager to be social and feed ourselves that we can't stop feeding our bodies to this virus.

Some kids have been in school since August. Many have played sports. Many adults have gone to bars without masks, and many states, including mine, haven't even proscribed doing so. Every time I go to the store, I see people leaving with a handful of items. Why did you bother? Why can't you stop yourself from feeding your body and your neighbors to this virus?

What's the difference between 2021 normal and 2019? The difference is that our oldest have died and will continue to die. If there was no vaccine, we'd simply have a much lower life expectancy. And many of us would get a hellish flu several times (maybe?) over the course of our lives. And some small percentage would have "long-haul" symptoms for years, perhaps.

With a vaccine, those repercussions drop by a factor of 100, don't they? You can't even sanely argue against going back to normal at a point that seems to be just a few months in the future, mutations be damned.

Because aside from having less of it for those who live longest, life would be and, again, for many already is, "normal". There would just be one very nasty extra "natural cause of death" culling our oldest generation -- and a sizeable, but small, percentage of our middle-aged and younger dying with them.

There will be fewer but not zero, not even 50% fewer, 700 person lecture halls in two years. I may not eat out very often for years, but most will. Most are. People may work remotely, but not because of COVID-19. Rather it will be because companies have seen, "When the workers stay home, they drop productivity by 5%, but we recoup it all spending less on facilities!" and, "If we can keep the top 30% most productive workers right now at home, we save 30% on rent and gain productivity!" and these selfish savings, for better or worse, will be lain on COVID, not the bean counters who deserve the praise or blame.

Life will be more dangerous than without this virus for the near future. But this virus morphs slowly and mRNA vaccines adapt quickly. In the richest countries, it seems likely that we will shove it into a corner quickly and, perhaps, will be able to eradicate it from the globe in decades, not centuries, if we have half a mind to.

The real lesson, and the difference I hope I see in the coming years, is that we take the to heart the real possibility that the next outbreak won't be nearly so (and it's painful to even conceive of COVID-19 like this) treatable. One might come that kills 20%, not 2%, of those it touches. It may spread through contact, not "just" sustained, shared respiration. It may mutate at 10x, 100x the speed of this one. We may not be able to contain it. It may kill our youngest with abandon instead of our oldest, causing anguish we haven't seen since the first Passover.

And then, if they don't learn the lesson and are as laissez-faire about their outbreak as we were about ours, when that future society gets back to 2019 "normal" (because if there's one thing we learned about human nature in 2020 it's that humans won't stop doing what they want to do now; normal always comes back) it will forever be paying a gruesomely higher price than we will.

Labels: covid, Other Stuff