My view, having endured 14 months of COVID-19 restrictions while looking at political, medical, business, and human behavioral data, is that the US will not return to a pre-COVID-19 normal (norm) of behavior.
Nationwide, the public is hearing that we have begun a return to health, along with a time of unprecedented prosperity. Yet on business news channels we hear responses to that message. Mostly the counter is that restarting an economy will take time and complicated resources. The government does not control the free will of individual citizens, nor does it control the decisions of millions of businesses. The economy in the US today is on life support because millions of people who used to have jobs have and continue to live on stimulus payments, an underground economy, and multiple “gig” jobs that mostly pay in cash. Businesses, mostly hampered by debt, are likely to rehire only qualified former employees who are essential. What about the rest of the unemployed?
A return to viability of the travel/leisure industry has been mentioned as a great hope. However, the commercial airline, cruise ship, and mass gathering entertainment industries have been designated as vectors of the pandemic. This year, the commercial airline industry has only been able to meet its high debt payments by using revenue from increased staff travel in early 2021. No profit, no dividend payments to investors, and a complete reliance on government stimulus payments to its idle workers are details that do not describe a business returning to a “norm.” The 1QCY2021 measure I recently read from an airline was that business trip it is still 80-90% below the pre-Covid norm. Business travel receipts were the essential ingredient in the old norm for commercial airlines.
Historically, on almost any subject, there is no continuous human “norm.” The constant changes, large, but small, in human behavior go unnoticed. A calamity, like a pandemic, stops the whole process, forcing us to adapt to the enemy (a virus). “The Enemy has a vote!” In military planning, always, the planners must determine all possible actions of the enemy commander, and the political will of the leadership and people behind that commander.
COVID-19, a micro-virus, spreads opportunistically among us. It has no leadership, no political will, and no experienced commander. Like water, the virus moves to the lowest (most vulnerable) points (habits) of gravity (human behavior) to make us soil for its survival and a host for its expansion, thus restricting us from what we choose to be ours. “normal”. .”
Our free will provides new opportunities for the virus to spread and mutate. It is insane to plan for humanity to go back to “the old norm” while a deadly living virus is doing what it has been doing all along. I have read about a claim that humanity eradicated a virus, smallpox, in the 1970s. Even that may be an exaggeration because smallpox has come and gone in previous human history. AIDS, bubonic plague, syphilis, and thousands of other viruses alive today are controlled primarily by attacking conditions, isolating places, sharing information, and applying vaccinations. All of that is a change in human behavior, not a return to normalcy.
God is not to blame. God put the first man (Adam) in charge of all plants and animals. We, as sons and daughters of Adam, are today expected to steward the natural world that he gave us. Microscopic organisms like viruses are not mentioned in the Bible, but just as small cells are the building blocks of all living matter, they have surely been with us since the beginning. Would almighty God cause a bat’s DNA to interbreed with human DNA? No. If he wanted to finish us off, he could kick our entire planet into the sun and finish us off. It has always done the opposite. He gives us grace from him. He expects us to come to him in prayer. It is our free will, our focus on our selfish desires that blinds us to the goodness of God’s grace and justifies our mismanagement of the world he gave us.
