Planning for the Post Pandemic

I have been thinking about our thinking about this pandemic.  I'm thinking about the early days, when we assumed we might go into lockdown for a week or two, and then everything would be O.K.  I'm thinking about some of the tweets I saw from those who were at more risk from this disease, tweets back in March that suggested that the vulnerable might need to shelter in place until June.  I remember feeling a bit baffled.  Until June?  I know that some of them are still sheltering in place.

I remember tweets and posts back in April that talked about how grateful people were that lockdown was happening in spring, that talked about how hard it would have been to shelter in place during the winter.  And now, winter approaches.  Many (most?) of us aren't sheltering in place and won't be during the coming months, but we may not have the same kind of ways to brighten winter.

A few weeks ago, we drove home by way of Hollywood Boulevard, through what once had been a thriving arts and entertainment district.  Many of the restaurants are now gone, including some that have been anchor sites for decades (goodbye Mama Mia's Italian restaurant where I first had gnocchi with an amazing gorgonzola sauce).

We've been assuming, most of us, that life will go back to normal at some point:  we'll drink in bars again, children will go off to a school building and return 6-8 hours later, workers will return to office buildings.  But that might not happen.  We've changed a lot of habits and practices, and now, some of them feel familiar.  Some of our new practices might be even better than our old practices--these changes won't be uniformly bad.

We've been assuming there will be a vaccine, but there may not be.  Sure, we've got lots of people across the world working on this problem, unlike with earlier diseases, like AIDS.  But that doesn't mean we'll have success.

We will likely get used to working around this disease.  We'll assess risk and proceed accordingly.  And if this disease progresses like many of them do, there will come a time when it doesn't seem so fearsome--either because we've gotten used to it or because it's not quite as fearsome.

When the implications of this disease first began to dawn on many of us, we thought about the ways we could reshape our societies to be better than the one we had.  I worry that part of our pandemic fatigue means not only are we letting our guard (and our masks) down, but we're also not thinking about the shape of the future anymore.  

I'm dreaming of a future where we have some guaranteed minimums in the realms of housing, work, health care, food . . . a world where an adjunct wouldn't turn down classes because she was making more for herself and her child by collecting unemployment (in a state that has purposefully kept unemployment benefits low) than by working.