Back to Normal?

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The news media, government at all levels, and various experts keep talking about getting back to normal this year. Even regular people keep bringing it up on social media, getting back to normal. Back to the office. Being able to go out and do what we want. All things that people are talking about like they are right around the corner.

But I have several points that make me think that we no longer know what normal is right now. Plus, I strongly suspect that there is some time before we approach anything that resembles the pre-pandemic normal that everyone is talking about. Let me tell you why I think this is the case.

First, we have never had a recorded pandemic that has lasted only a single year. Yes, we have modern medicine, but that only covers about a third to half of the world’s population. The rest of the world is much closer to early twentieth to late-nineteenth-century medicine. Even in so-called advanced parts of the world like the USA, Europe, and China, large segments of the population have not gotten the vaccine for one reason or another. To make things worse viruses mutate, quickly. The whole delta variant fiasco should be showing what happens. We have advantages that we have never had to fight pandemics. Still, in the past, pandemics lasted decades or centuries, not months or years. Even the 1918 flu pandemic lasted five years, maybe more, depending on which statistics you…