If this pandemic teaches us a lesson, it will be to think more carefully about who to sneeze | Coronavirus

II felt like everyone hunkered down for a long discussion based on the idea that the vaccine was years away. “It’s a distant dream, so we should learn to live with death” was one side, the other was: “Or maybe we could learn to live with this completely different way of life?” I didn’t even expect to win fast, much less did I expect the vaccine to actually arrive, not as proof or hope, but as 800,000 vials, all containing something that apparently works.

And that has catapulted us so quickly into a different topic that even two people on the same (metaphorical) podium can’t agree. The prime minister is promising maskless nirvana just around the corner, where we hug and kiss like it’s 2019. Deputy Medical Director, Jonathan Van-Tam, advises people that they still want to take precautions for many months, even years, to come. People who miss the office are already doing that thing where their tie matches very subtly with their socks. People who hated the office declare him dead. How normal you expect 2021 to be depends largely on how you’d prefer “normal” to be. Over time, I suspect it will rearrange around the preferences of the experts, simply because they make more noise.

Permanent changes will affect all the things we really didn’t know or thought about. I remember Carl Heneghan, who later in the crisis became more known as a blockade skeptic, explaining about respiratory diseases: how you really shouldn’t visit any of the elders if you had a trace. Like, bearing this in mind, when you were fit like a flea, you should make a point of visiting, to make up for the times you shouldn’t. It was obvious once he said that, but I never thought about it.

And it wasn’t until the appalling death rates among bus drivers came to light that I considered how often those in public employment have to get sick. I knew the primary school teachers, because children are parasites, and I knew the MPs because they never stop talking about their colds related to handshaking, but I had never thought about cashiers.

Hopefully what this pandemic will leave behind is not a neurotic fear of this particular virus, but the environmental behavioral impact of finally clocking that all infections are worse for some people than they are for you.