COVID-19 After A Year: Return To Normalcy Is Imperative

With the first week of March behind us, it's hard not to reflect on where the country was one year ago this week, in its final throes of pre-pandemic innocence before it became painfully clear that the globe was about to be rocked by a virus worse than anything it had experienced in a century.  By the third week in March last year, everybody got a fast education on how seriously and how drastically our lives were poised to change, with key springtime sporting events abruptly canceled and workers deemed "nonessential" ordered to work from home.  Given the arcane procedures at my workplace I never expected to be among those allowed to work from home, but starting on March 17, 2020, it happened.  March 2020 will live in infamy with the dawn of the financial crisis in September 2008 where I was truly fearful of how bottomless the sea of despair facing the country (and indeed the world) would prove to be in the foreseeable future.

Reflecting on this pandemic a year later, it's a curious contrast between what's gone better than I expected in late March 2020, what's gone worse, and what's gone about as I expected.....

At the top of the list of what's gone better than I expected is the durability of the American economy.  Between the late February collapse of the stock market and economic forecasts suggesting a contraction larger than was seen in the Great Depression was forthcoming, I was genuinely petrified.  At this time last year, everything from post-Soviet-collapse-era unemployment numbers to defaulting pension plans seemed like a live possibility, and the nature of the modern economy being what it is, with steep declines at the outset of recessions and ridiculously slow recoveries, it seemed like a lost decade was inevitable.  Yet somehow, those worst-case scenarios I figured to be more likely than not seem unreasonably fatalistic in retrospect.  The federal government has successfully backfilled more lost economic activity than I anticipated being possible with multiple rounds of stimulus that have not only kept us from going over a cliff, but has actually left most states in better financial standing than they were a few years ago.

In addition to the federal funds, which of course are paid for with borrowed money and will come with a long-term price, we've largely learned to live with the virus and still carry on with the majority of economic activity better than seemed possible last March when we were letting our groceries and mail sit for hours after picking them up so as not to ingest whatever COVID-infested germs might be resting upon them.  Thankfully, we came to discover that the virus was not generally spread that way and were able to carry on the bulk of business as usual, albeit while wearing masks.  But to be clear, if the virus was as contagious as we originally feared and there was a legitimate risk of becoming infected by touching your mail, then both the pandemic and the economic fallout from it would have been as catastrophic as was speculated 11 months ago.

But the flip side of that is that the virus has been vastly more stubborn than I ever imagined or that even the biggest fear-mongers led us to believe would be possible last spring.  Last March, the running theory was that COVID would have a sharp rise followed by a dramatic late spring retreat....and would likely return in the fall for another spike.  But for all intents and purposes, there was never a genuine retreat with this virus, only an ebb and a flow.  Most expected the virus to go largely dormant in the summer, but it never did.  In fact, there was a sharp spike in caseloads in July after the country started to let its guard down.  And unfortunately, the virologists were accurate about the fall surge, with November and December being particularly ugly months for infections, vastly exceeding the mid-spring surge that spooked the most people.  Even now, with infections dramatically dropping again from the early winter peak, the rate of spread remains much higher than it was last spring and the body count, at one point estimated to top off around 60,000, is now poised to exceed 600,000 and thus higher than the number of lives claimed during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

In addition to lowballing the durability and human toll of COVID, the virus is also defying expectations on its mutation.  Last year we were told that the virus would inevitably weaken over time as all viruses do, but COVID once again proved it wasn't like other viruses.  Just as peak summer sun did nothing to weaken the virus last July, time has done nothing to weaken its mutation.  In fact, new strains are popping up across the globe that are stronger and more contagious than the virus's original form, making the race to vaccinate all the more urgent.

While there was plenty about the past year's events that proved far less predictable than anticipated, there was one aspect of the pandemic's toll that I saw coming from the outset and was unfortunately vindicated about....and that was its impact on people's mental health.  The historical trajectory of most pandemics begins with national and global unity to do whatever it takes to stop it in its tracks....followed by an eventual adherence to natural selection principles where people calculate the risk of viral spread to be less personally applicable than the reward of returning to normalcy.  It didn't take long for last spring's moment of unity to start cleaving apart, and the downsides of isolation mounted as the weeks went by.

On top of the economic anxiety scaring the bejeezus out of those who weren't fortunate enough to be able to work from home at full salary, the cabin fever also made us uniquely vulnerable to other polarizing cultural and political trends.  Whether it be unrest on the streets over racial injustice issues last summer or the conspiracy-drenched extremist movements that gained currency online and escalated to a full-blown insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January, the preexisting national anxiety brought about by all of this social isolation poured gasoline on the culture war fires.  There are few times in our nation's history where we've more desperately needed unification than the contemporary era, meaning this pandemic came at the worst possible time in terms of driving us further apart and exacerbating poisonous ongoing trends that were already dooming us.

With that in mind, we need to get back to normal as quickly as possible.  We need to gather as a people in the venues we took for granted 18 short months ago.  We need to get our kids back in school.  We need to step away from our computer screens and everything on them that's radicalizing us.  If not for the neck-snapping pace of vaccination development and distribution, there would be no end in sight for this pandemic.  We should never fail to quit appreciating how lucky we are that this vaccine became available so quickly as there would clearly be no end in sight otherwise with COVID's rampage showing no signs of running out of gas organically.  And while there's been some frustration with the pace of the vaccine rollout since December, the magnitude of the undertaking is such that we don't really have that much grounds to complain.

However, there have been troubling indicators that have come thus far in 2021, primarily in the form of political leaders' shifting goalposts on the return to normalcy that is so vital to the psychological health of our people.  In the past month, leading voices such as Anthony Fauci and Joe Biden have gone from predicting a late spring or early summer timeline for normalcy to "Christmas" or "sometime in 2022".  With all due respect, that ain't gonna fly, at least not outside of a worst-case scenario where the vaccines don't work and the viral spread continues at a pace comparable to what we've seen in the last 12 months.

To put it succinctly, once people get vaccines in their arms, they will expect things to go back to normal very quickly.  And if things don't go back to normal, people will take matters into their own hands.  They're not gonna wait until "Christmas" to return to their lives.  The crowds will return to gathering places and the masks will come off.  They're not gonna wait for the risk to drop to zero and they're not gonna be held hostage to whatever percentage of the population refuses to get the vaccine. They're not gonna keep watching their kids fail their classes trying to learn mostly from a laptop screen. This is human nature.  A significant minority of the population lost their patience for lockdowns months ago, and tens of millions more will join the ranks of the maskless Texas cowboys if they're told the pandemic is actually only at halftime and they have to continue sitting around at home for multiple months even after getting vaccinated.

As far as Fauci and other virologists are concerned, I get it.  From a viral risk mitigation strategy, the longer people avoid human contact the greater the chances of fully slaying COVID and saving as many lives as possible.  But the strategy doesn't jive with human nature.  If and when we cross the tipping point where the psychological toll of prolonged cabin fever exceeds the physical toll of COVID infection, then it's time to put social distancing officially in the rearview mirror.  Insofar as the vaccine reduces the risk of hospitalization or death to almost zero even among those who still contract COVID after the shot, the calculus becomes that much more obvious.  If more people will be killed or permanently impaired either mentally or legally with the unrest that comes from the psychological toll of another canceled summer than are killed or impaired from COVID infection in the months to come, then people need to be allowed to roam free.  

Our fragile economy depends upon it too as even though we've held up far better than expected a year ago, multiple additional months of an even partial lockdown economy could still lead to an economic death spiral more consistent with early pandemic fears.  Assuming Biden and Congress manage to get the current round of stimulus through, it's pretty clear they're not politically positioned to get another one.  The economy has to expand organically from this point forward, and it won't do that if summer 2021 more closely resembles summer 2020 than summer 2019.

There's probably a strategy in play by Biden (and perhaps Fauci and other virologists) to "underpromise and overdeliver", in sharp contrast to the Trump administration which always did the opposite.  If they're telling people we won't be back to normal by Christmas but we're able to return to normal in October, they can declare victory.  Even so, the goalposts for victory have moved enough in the last month to deeply concern me, and a return to normalcy by October is still far too late for what the pubic will tolerate if the majority of them are vaccinated and COVID infection and death rates crater throughout the spring.  Make no mistake about it....if the country isn't back to normal until "Christmas", Biden's Presidency is over.