LogFAQs > #948003885

brian577 posted...

The recommendations are not the issue. The issue is their inability to end this and or even give an actual timeline for doing so. They said a year, now it's two, next it'll be 5. I want my damn life back I'm tired of their inability to do that.

And how do you propose they do that? Do you complain that a mechanic is incompetent when your car doesn't fly after you get it back from maintenance? Do you complain that a chef is incompetent when your food doesn't sustain you for a month? Do you complain that a doctor is incompetent when they can't cure cancer in a single regular office visit?

This pandemic is an extremely volatile situation that is completely unprecedented in modern history. Everybody has gone into this blind and is struggling to figure it out as they go along. That's simply how science works (and has always worked). People just don't usually realize that because they don't need immediate answers and therefore only pay attention to the end result when the researchers are done figuring it out. When the world does need immediate answers, you're going to see those answers (and the subsequent predictions and recommendations) change as the situation and the understanding thereof evolve. The necessary information simply does not exist to make definite, unchanging predictions. That's not incompetence on the part of doctors and scientists, it's empirical reality.

If you want something resembling a timeline, vaccines can be expected to roll out to the general public by next summer. Getting enough of the population vaccinated to make a significant difference will then take a few months, so you'll probably be looking at September-October before restrictions can truly start to be relaxed, though some relaxation will happen as case numbers start to drop (you can see this already in regions that have done a good job of containing the virus). That process will happen gradually, but by the beginning of 2022 things should be more or less back to normal. Expect to keep wearing masks for a few months past that to be on the safe side, though many regions will lift mandates. Working from home will continue for many fields now that its viability has been proven, though it will stop being a necessity. Governments will continue to experiment with ways to improve their responses to any future pandemics that might emerge, which will likely result in a number of new rules here and there (though the specifics of that are largely impossible to predict, beyond greater investment in pre-pandemic surveillance).

Give or take ~6 months from any of those time frames, that's about what the next year will look like. Life will likely never fully return to a pre-pandemic normal because this experience has proven that the world is hopelessly unprepared for such a threat (as well as that said threat does exist), but the new precautions stemming from that realization won't make a huge difference to everyday life. You can expect that a reasonable approximation of the "new normal" will be achieved within less than a year, depending on how bad local case numbers are.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.