Back To Normal? Oh, Sure

My best friends keep asking me when I think we'll be able to go traveling again. Are we going to France, Italy, Spain, Thailand, Morocco, India...? And when? My gut tells me it isn't going to be soon. I don't see 2021 as a year when things start heading back to normal.

On Wednesday Dr. Fauci sounded an optimistic note when he spoke to the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, telling the business chieftains that an effective vaccine and public-health measures could put the coronavirus pandemic "behind us" and that a return to a "reasonable form of normality" is possible by end of 2021. The Journal's Betsy McKay reported that he said "With a combination of a good vaccine together with good public health measures, we may be able to put this coronavirus outbreak behind us, the way we put the original SARS behind us." I suppose that was to calm Trump down after he flipped out about CDC head Robert Redfield's Senate testimony on Wednesday in which he said it would take a year before a COVID vaccine is generally available and that people should get used to wearing masks. Redfield responded to the senators "when" questions like this: "If you’re asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we’re probably looking at third-- late second quarter, third quarter 2021."

Trump blew his top and called him "confused" when he predicated that he thinks it will take a year before a coronavirus vaccine will be "generally available to the American public." Trump is telling voters "we’re going to have a vaccine in a matter of weeks." Redfield said there may be something available for first responders in November or December, which is not a message Trump wants out there. "I think he made a mistake with that statement," said Señor Trumpanzee. "When he said it, I believe he was confused. I’m just telling you we’re ready to go."

Nor did Trump enjoy Redfield telling that senators that he believes masks are "the most important, powerful public health tool we have" to fight the pandemic. "This face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine." Noted epidemiologist Dr. Señor Trumpanzee called that "a mistake... Masks have problems too... A lot of people did not like the concept of mask initially, Dr Fauci didn’t like it initially." At his disastrous ABC News town hall on Tuesday night in Philly, Trump continued disparaging masks, telling a questioner that "a lot of people think the masks are not good," citing waiters as "a lot of people."

Trump also blew up when Biden noted that Trump isn't believable when he talks about a quick vaccine. The Washington Post's Sean Sullivan reported yesterday that most Americans distrust Trump on the question of a safe vaccine, "raising doubts about the president’s ability to put the health of Americans before politics... 'I trust vaccines. I trust scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump,' Biden said. 'And at this point, the American people can’t, either.' Biden also raised the possibility of President Trump pressuring agency officials to sign off on a vaccine that scientists are not yet confident in, to gain an electoral advantage."

Biden cast doubt not only on Trump but also on those around him. Asked whether he trusted the CDC and FDA, Biden said he did not trust “people like the fellow that just took a leave of absence.” He appeared to be referring to Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, who urged Trump’s supporters to prepare for an armed insurrection and accused scientists in his agency of “sedition.”

As Biden addressed reporters, he attacked Trump’s handling of the pandemic and comments in an ABC town hall defending his administration’s response, despite widely documented problems with it. Biden urged Americans to ask themselves how it made them feel to hear Trump say he would not have done things differently.

Biden said people should not expect results just because the president is talking up the possibility of a vaccine. “Scientific breakthroughs don’t care about calendars any more than the virus does,” he said. He warned that politics should have no place in the production of a vaccine.

The Democrat’s position has become a point of contention in the campaign, with Trump accusing Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-CA), of spreading “anti-vaccine rhetoric.”

At a Wednesday news conference, Trump said Biden’s comments were “anti-vaccine” and “hurting the importance of what we’re doing.” He added, “I know that if they were in this position, they’d be saying how wonderful it is.”

Biden said he would have no problems endorsing a vaccine-- provided it met certain criteria. If the administration greenlights a vaccine, Biden said, “who will validate it was driven by science? What groups of scientists?”

He added that Americans must be confident “distribution will be safe and cost-free,” with a plan that is “without a hint of favoritism.”

...Biden also lambasted Trump for not aggressively encouraging mask-wearing and alleging that waiters do not like to wear them. The Democrat defended his own calls for a national mask mandate, saying he would seek to implement one by working with governors but was not completely sure yet what legal authorities he would have to deploy such a rule. (He said his advisers think they can create a mandate.)

It's worth remembering that just half of American bother using the annual influenza vaccine, even when it is given away free in supermarket pharmacies and when doctors tell their patients to get it. I suspect an awful lot of Americans are going to be far warier of any vaccine rushed onto the market to coincide with Trump's reelection efforts.

So... going back to my original question about renting a villa in Tuscany, a riad in Marrakech or a hut on Koh Pi Pi, The Atlantic's Joe Pinsker speculated yesterday that There Won’t Be a Clear End to the Pandemic and that "the collective sense of closure we’re all longing for may never arrive. Instead, brace for a slow fade into a new normal."

He wrote that, like our travel plans, "The pandemic has rendered many activities unsafe, but thankfully it can’t stop us from fantasizing about them. A common balm that people reach for is the sentence construction 'When this is over, I’m going to ____.' It seems to help, if only in a fleeting way, for them to imagine all of the vacations they’ll go on, all of the concerts they’ll attend, and all of the hugs they’ll give, as soon as they’re able to. Unfortunately, the sublime post-pandemic period that so many are longing for will likely not arrive all at once, like a clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve. If and when the pandemic is over someday-- in the sense that it’s safe to resume normal life, or something like it-- pinpointing its conclusion may never be possible. Internalizing that, and mentally bracing for a slow fade into the new normal, might lead to less angst. Whatever the end of the pandemic might look like, the United States is nowhere close to it at the moment; week after week, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to test positive for COVID-19, and several thousand die from it. But when the threat of the pandemic does eventually subside, the process will likely be gradual and incremental. 'I don’t think there’s going to be, all of a sudden, one day when we can all go make out with people at the grocery store,' Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me. 'Our concept of how the pandemic will end is just as oversimplified as the way we’ve approached everything else about it.' As a matter of epidemiology, there’s no clear-cut criterion that determines a pandemic to be over. 'You can’t sign a treaty with a virus, so we have to settle for a kind of cease-fire,' says Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. One intuitive end point is full-on eradication-- meaning that the coronavirus no longer circulates in humans or animals-- but that outcome is quite unlikely, in part because of how easily the virus could continue to reach still-susceptible groups of people anywhere on Earth even well into the future."

The way that people process the end of the pandemic could have to do with how abruptly their life changes after it. One theory for how people mentally perceive transitions from one event to another is that they notice when their expectations of what will happen next start to get upended-- “like the disorientation you feel when a movie abruptly shifts to a new setting,” says Lance Rips, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Under this framework, if someone undergoes a big life change during the final stages of the pandemic (say, moving or getting a new job after a bout of unemployment), they might be more likely to register a turning point. But if instead they merely start going out more, day by day, that might not yield the same discombobulation that can mark moments of transition.

Even if people crave a swift restoration of normalcy, many have come to terms with the fact that they won’t get it. “Wearing a mask is just like making sure you pocket your keys at this point,” says Athul Acharya, a 34-year-old lawyer in Portland, Oregon. The pandemic “has now lasted long enough that I, at least, don’t find myself waiting for the end. Looking forward to it? Yes. But anticipating it as a thing that will happen in the tangible future? Not so much.”

But a gradual fade-out-- one without clear indicators about the safety of resuming normal activities-- might be particularly distressing for some people. “Those with generalized anxiety disorder, in which a person experiences uncontrollable worry over a range of topics, could really be suffering,” Sandra Llera, a clinical-psychology professor at Towson University, wrote to me in an email. “If we don’t have a clear-cut ending, those with a tendency to worry”-- whether they have a diagnosable disorder or not-- “might experience a lot of stress about when we can begin to safely return to business as usual.”

This sort of uncertainty probably will, in a way, manifest society-wide during the pandemic’s final stages, as a politically polarized nation bickers about whether it’s really over or not. “It’ll be just as much of a mess as everything else that’s happened so far,” Marcus, the Harvard epidemiologist, said.

This dispute won't exactly be new: The country has been having a debate about whether the pandemic is over practically since it started. In late March, President Donald Trump said he’d “love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” and in mid-June, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an op-ed asserting that “panic” about a second wave of infections was “overblown.” (Since the piece was published, some 75,000 Americans are estimated to have died from COVID-19.)

When the pandemic is actually petering out, public-health experts may have even more trouble conveying the precautions people should take when going about their day. “The particular challenge of a lack of a concrete end is that there is … a much more complicated calculus of what people should be doing in their behavior,” Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a fellow at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me. In “a complicated, gray landscape,” she said, “there is more room for debate, error, and nuance in who should do what and when to protect themselves, their families, and their community.”