Normal is gone.

We will never get back to what we think of as “normal.”

Consider this. We made no attempt to contain the coronavirus. It is now wild in the world. We will be unable to clean every surface or identify every carrier. It will now be there forever.

What does that mean?

We don’t know yet if treatments or a vaccine are even possible. They may be. Maybe not.

We now have effective treatments for HIV/AIDS, but they took decades to develop. We might get a vaccine, but not before summer or fall of 2021 at the earliest.

Until we get a vaccine — if we get one — there will be repeated waves of TrumPlague infections. We must handle those future waves better, with massive testing and effective contact tracing.

Between waves as well as during those waves, we’ll engage in social distancing as a matter of course. We must do so, or the death toll will never flatten.

We’ve seen some of this before. For decades, social contact was constrained by concern over AIDS transmission. Meet someone at a bar or blind date, you find ways to ask if they’ve been tested for AIDS. We will find ways to ask if they’ve tested positive for Rona antibodies. If so, they’re safe.

The difference though is that with HIV/AIDS, extremely intimate contact is usually necessary for transmission. With coronavirus, you can get it by shaking hands, or by chatting at a table over a cup of coffee. If you haven’t had it and recovered, a casual conversation could be fatal.

But we can’t go back to work — we can’t meet someone and shake hands — we can’t have a chat with a friend at a table over coffee — until there is massive and widespread testing, so we know who has recovered from an infection, and who is asymptomatic but contagious (and people in the latter group must be isolated).

That means for the next year, either we don’t go back to work, or we test hundreds of millions of people. Repeatedly. Because you might not be infected now, but you could be next week. And we need to know.

And when I say “going back to work,” I also mean going to Starbucks or a movie or a playground or a restaurant.

Say we do get a vaccine. Everyone in the country who doesn’t have antibodies (ie., they’ve already recovered from having been ill with it) must be inoculated. No exceptions. Fuck anti-vaxxers. They don’t get to opt out.

Universal vaccinations won’t happen in a day. It will take months. If we get a vaccine in September 2021, we have to manufacture hundreds of millions of vaccines and send doctors to every hamlet and crossroads diner. Maybe by the end of 2022 we’ll be at 90% or so. Plus, there’s the rest of the world to consider.

Unless we stop international travel, we have to inoculate the world. We have to hit everywhere on the planet that’s had coronavirus spread. It’s possible. It’s been done. We eradicated smallpox and polio. It took years, but we did it.

In the meantime, we will get used to cleaning everything regularly. We’ll get used to social distancing. We’ll get used to not shaking hands or hugging strangers or touching our faces. Our culture will change. It has to. Our view of other people will change. It has to. It has to change not only to let us survive this crisis, but also to teach us to avoid the next one — because even after we defeat the TrumpVirus, we know there can be, there will be, another one. We can never afford to forget that, ever again.

And none of the above deals with the hell we’re going to go through for the next several months to a year, in repeating waves. Massive death. Cities having their hospitals overwhelmed. Loved ones falling gravely ill and dying, with us being unable to visit them.

We may go through a time of deprivation, shortages, rationing, starvation — depending on how bad it gets. Yes, it could get that bad.

There will be post-traumatic stress, and survivor guilt, on a national scale.

Our way of looking at the world will change.

People who lived through the Holocaust or the Great Depression or the World Wars were never the same. We won’t be, either.

The world will never be the same. We will never again have what we now think of as “normal.”

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Afterthought:

It is far too early to know how to feel about the long-term consequences. For all the horror of it, the Bubonic Plague and the World Wars and all those other disasters also brought about explosions of creativity in the sciences and the arts and in culture. Suffering=growth. But we can’t avoid the suffering.