Well. It feels like the world is slowly starting to spin again.
Next week will see restaurants open outdoor seating here in Ohio. Indoor seating will follow a week after.
Maybe it’s the eternal optimist in me, but it feels like a positive outlook has some momentum behind it. Like things are getting a little bit better each day versus the inverse from a couple of months ago.
Do I think we are out of the woods yet? No. I’m nervous about opening up too quickly and risking further spread. But I am also nervous about opening up too slowly and risking further economic meltdown. The people most worried about a “second wave” of infections are the same people that expected upwards of half a million deaths in the US from the pandemic. I hope they are as wrong about the former as they were the latter.
Will things get worse before they get better? Will we see a second wave? And a third? What if treatment and vaccines don’t come as quickly as we hope?
Or is the medicine really worse than the disease? Have the actions of our government been designed to save face versus save lives? Was flipping the off switch on our economy really necessary? What will the second and third order effects of this economic slowdown be?
As with most things in life, I expect the truth is somewhere in the middle. This pandemic likely isn’t as bad as one side would have you believe while simultaneously being much more serious than the other argues.
I both believe and hope the trajectory towards normalcy will continue. I expect there to be bumps in the road and further scares in the coming months and years, but I do expect that we will defeat this pandemic.
What I don’t believe is that things will ever completely go back to normal.
In the words of Praxidike Meng, “Biological Equilibria? They’re not straightforward. Never.”
We may approach “normalcy” but we will never reach it. Because true “normalcy” never existed and it never will. The world is a massively complex and ever-evolving system. This pandemic will cause permanent changes.
But will those changes be positive or negative? Will the lessons from the current crisis help us avert the next one? Or will we stick our heads in the sand and say this was a “once in a lifetime event” (which, according to the airlines industry seems to happen about once a decade)?
I believe that the threat of widespread epidemics will continue to be one of the greatest struggles that we face as a human race. We won’t be getting less interconnected anytime soon. Global commerce will continue to be just that, global. The population will continue to increase and urban centers will continue to grow in size and density. As terrible as the Coronavirus has been, it is scary to think that it could have been worse. COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted the elderly and those with complicating health factors. Children and healthy adults have, by-and-large, little to fear from the pandemic itself. But that is not how all diseases work. For a typical epidemic, diseases generally follow a U-shape age curve, causing severe damage to both the elderly and the young. Imagine the damage that the current pandemic could have done if it had followed usual disease age-curves…
I hope that we can learn from the collective mistakes we made when facing the COVID-19 pandemic and that we take the actions necessary to be much better prepared to face the next one. We can create a strategic stockpile of medical and protective equipment to make sure we are not at the mercy of international supply lines. We can rethink how we structure our physical spaces to ensure for appropriate space per person. We can develop common-sense precautionary measures to keep businesses open and operating even during future epidemics. We can ensure that schools and businesses are equipped with the technology they need to transition to remote operations if necessary. We can remove stigmas around staying home from work and school when you aren’t feeling well. We can enact more flexible work schedules that allow people to work on schedules that are best for them. We can increase security measures and make temperature checks common place at airports and offices. We can develop a playbook for how to deal with environments that are especially susceptible to quickly spread the disease like nursing homes and prisons.
We can learn from this and be better prepared for future pandemics.
We can beat them just like we will beat this current pandemic.
We can do all these things.
But will we?