No.

I am coming to terms with it, because of super stupid people we won’t ever reach heard immunity so we will have covid restrictions for a very long time to come.

For the life of me I can’t understand why it’s so hard to just get the vaccine ,if we could get in the high 90percentile we might just get a handle on it.
But it looks like we will be doing the mask, and social distancing thing for a very long time to come.

Covid19 will not go away but I think the situation has improved and will continue to improve. Viruses like this are a part of human history.

Another neighbor died from Covid pneumonia yesterday so yes, I accept this is our new normal as far as masks and boosters.

Office work will never be the same again.

To quote Obadiah Stane: “the dude abides”

Nope.

Come to FL and see how close to normal we are. Good or bad.

Here are my guesses:

I hope masks persist as norms during travel and crowded venues, but eventually that will be personal choice also and most people will go back to maskless. I estimate that will be some time in 2023.

I have always wanted more warnings, attention, and precautions given to bad flu seasons, and I think by 2023 we will be back to just letting the public be in ignorant bliss unless the hospitalization or death is affecting them directly. When covid deaths are estimated to be less than 50,000 a year with no precautions except boosters in the US it will be just another infectious disease.

Retail was already on the way to more online shopping. Malls were closing up. Covid hastened some of that process, but again, come to FL and go into IKEA or a mall and it’s busy like always.

I hope more flexibility in the workplace stays forever changed. I always thought women would be the leaders in this and it would help all genders, but covid wound up being a huge shock to the system to push this change into high gear.

I have accepted that many thing will never return to the way they were prior.
Many of these changes are just common sense.

Sad as it may be (the deaths, the sick, and the devided society), the current situation is much to my liking.
I appreciate that this is a very personal, maybe egotistical, opinion, but there you go.
So, I’m not worried that we aren’t going back to before, to ‘normal’.
I accept it.
I welcome it.

Yes. I’ve accepted that this is going to be the rest of my life. I got 29 years without it, so that’s not bad. But COVID will be like the cold or flu in that it will be endemic and recurring and will vary in severity. I do think masks in some situations will be forever.

one world change I want to see happen, and never go back, is I want the “the world changed when X” and “the world will never be the same after Y” memes to stop.

All those conversations, for 9–11, for bird flu, for swine flu, for Covid-19, have all been exaggerations and excuses and perpetuation of unhealthy, inaccurate, and weird (to me) notions of what “normal” culture or “the world” is or ought to be, and/or has included a healthy dose of political and/or news-media sensationalism, whether to get everyone to buy in to security power grabs, or just to make news media seem more compelling.

Yes, there has been a Covid-19 pandemic. There have been other pandemics. There will be more. There may likely be far worse pandemics in the future, largely due to human over-use of industrial meat farming, antibiotics, etc.

I would expect, unless/until the climate situation and/or serious wars start causing worse problems first, that eventually Covid-19 will become less of a problem in wealthier problems and masks/immunizations/social-distancing will no longer be a widespread concern in most nations.

“The way things were” is too often used in a weird mythologized way. Things change. Even when there isn’t a major event. And then they change again. Some things revert to more or less “how they were”, when appropriate. Then other things change. Dangers abate, and so do reactions to them. Some changes are improvements (acceptance of working from home, and attention on the need for social/economic/medical support and international cooperation), and some ought to be reversed (security theater, torture of suspected “terrorists”). So it goes.

Not quite. I’m not much of an optimist, generally, but I believe, or hope, really, that eventually a definitive treatment will be discovered, allowing for a gradual return to “full” normalcy.

If Paxlovid proves safe, effective, and widely available, I think we can hopefully return to some semblance of normalcy, unless of course the fucking anti-vaxers/maskers manage to help mutate a strain that renders Paxlovid and/or the vaccines ineffective.

The “new normal” is probably a ways away, and I will be interested to see how it develops. Modern medicine and vaccines, with all their life saving benefits, have very likely dramatically delayed the “end” of this pandemic. I am grateful for all of those measures, but it showcases the differences between the pandemic a century ago and this one.

The new South African strain will likely delay it further. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/26/what-do-we-know-about-the-new-south-africa-covid-variant

@canidmajor When I heard about the new strain from South Africa, my first thought was “this isn’t going away for a really, really long time.”