March 2. 2121

The Most Likely Timeline for Life to Return to Normal

An uncertain spring, an amazing summer, a cautious fall and winter, and then, finally, relief.

FEBRUARY 22, 2021

The end of the coronavirus pandemic is on the horizon at last, but the timeline for actually getting there feels like it shifts daily, with updates about viral variants, vaccine logistics, and other important variables seeming to push back the finish line or scoot it forward. When will we be able to finally live our lives again?

Pandemics are hard to predict accurately, but we have enough information to make some confident guesses. A useful way to think about what’s ahead is to go season by season. In short: Life this spring will not be substantially different from the past year; summer could, miraculously, be close to normal; and next fall and winter could bring either continued improvement or a moderate backslide, followed by a near-certain return to something like pre-pandemic life.

Here, in more detail, is what Americans can expect daily life to look like for the next four(-ish) seasons.

SPRING 2021

For the most part, daily life will continue to be far from normal for the next few months. Normal is of course a slippery word, given that many Americans have had to report to work or have chosen to dine out, travel, and do all sorts of things that others have avoided. But whatever people have not been doing for the past year, they can expect to keep not doing it this spring.

It’s unlikely that enough people will get vaccinated in the spring to restore normalcy. In fact, experts fear that the pandemic could get much worse in the near term, because variants of the virus that are more contagious or vaccine-resistant than the original version have begun circulating in the United States. The damage those variants will do is still unknown; “March to May is the mystery,” as my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote earlier this month.

The good news, though, is that even with these variants, existing vaccines appear to reduce the risk of severe illness, meaning more and more people will be protected as vaccinations continue. And vaccines can change individuals’ risk calculus. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, told me that in a month or so, in the absence of a variant-driven surge, he’d probably be comfortable going to a friend’s house for a drink, mask-free and indoors, if he and his friend were both fully vaccinated. “As we get into late spring, a lot of that stuff—the smaller gatherings of vaccinated people—I think starts becoming quite possible,” Jha said

SUMMER 2021

Whatever happens in the spring, the summer should be a sublime departure from what Americans have lived through so far. As my colleague James Hamblin wrote last week, “In most of the U.S., the summer could feel … ‘normal,’” even “revelatory.”

“Barring some variant that is just really crazy, I expect the summer to be a lot like the summer of 2019,” Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me. Based on the drop-off in cases and hospitalizations over the past few weeks, he thinks life could even be close to normal as soon as sometime in May.

Other experts I consulted were slightly less optimistic, but they generally agreed that at some point between June and September, the combination of widespread vaccinations and warmer weather would likely make many activities much safer, including having friends and family over indoors, taking public transit, being in a workplace, dining inside restaurants, and traveling domestically (whether for work, visiting loved ones, or a vacation).

Regardless of when vaccines for children become available, all of the above applies to kids and their families, according to Emily Oster, an economist at Brown who writes about everyday pandemic decision making in her newsletter ParentData. In-person schooling should become safer as well. Though the timing for kids’ vaccines is uncertain, Oster’s guess is that they might become available over the summer for children 12 and up, and later for children under 12, perhaps in the fall.

The safest way to phase activities back in will be for people to gradually go from smaller, private social settings (such as a friend’s house) to bigger, public ones (such as a restaurant)—which is also what many will probably feel most comfortable with. “People will slowly expand the social world that they engage in, building [their] pod back up,” predicts Oster.

Jha, for instance, expects to host 20 or so friends for a Fourth of July barbecue in his backyard, with every adult vaccinated and no one having to wear a mask. He imagines himself being comfortable eating indoors at a restaurant later on in the summer, provided it’s not packed and the ventilation is decent.

The summer will still have its limitations, though. The experts I spoke with didn’t foresee the return of indoor concerts, full attendance at sporting events, or high levels of international travel.

They did, however, expect that Americans will be able to ease up on mask wearing and social distancing in other contexts. “I think when people are vaccinated themselves, they will start letting their guard down, but it will also genuinely be safer from a public-health perspective,” said Jennifer Beam Dowd, a professor of demography and population health at the University of Oxford and the chief scientific officer of Dear Pandemic, a COVID-19 public-education campaign. Noymer’s prediction is that masking will be necessary in public settings until every American has at least been offered a vaccine, at which point he figures he would be okay with repealing mask mandates.

Even once these precautions are no longer strictly necessary, many people will probably keep up some of them, opting to wear a mask, say, on public transportation or in a grocery store. Oster thinks that while certain activities should become much safer over the summer, many people might not be comfortable resuming them until the end of the year or even later.

FALL/WINTER 2021–22

Even if the summer feels like the end of the pandemic, it could turn out to be more of a temporary reprieve.

Most of the U.S. population should be vaccinated by the fall, but some resurgence of the virus seems likely in the colder months. “It won’t be as bad as this winter, but I don’t know if it’s going to be pretty bad or [if] just a few people will get it,” Noymer said.

Thankfully, the latter scenario seems more likely, and could still allow for additional normalcy; indoor concerts might even come back. “The summer might be a little early for really large crowds,” Dowd said. “I see the autumn as the important turning point for those kinds of mass gatherings.”

This scenario might result in isolated viral flare-ups, but vaccines should significantly reduce the likelihood that anyone who gets infected would end up in the hospital, and could also make them less likely to spread the virus.

Another outcome seems less probable but more troubling: Whether because a variant ends up evading existing vaccines or because infections surge among unvaccinated people, cases might climb again. Even after a wonderful summer, a rise in cases could necessitate a reversion to many of the precautions from earlier in the pandemic, even if it doesn’t require full-on lockdowns. “I’m not saying that the return of the masks and working from home and all the crap that we hate is guaranteed,” Noymer said. “But if it does return, it won’t be in the summer. It’ll be in the fall.”

Thankfully, though, if stubborn variants do circulate, new vaccines should be able to tame them relatively quickly. Adjusting an existing vaccine recipe could take only a few months, meaning that the disruption to daily life would not be as drawn out as what Americans have lived through already.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Beyond next winter, experts’ predictions are blessedly simple: Life in the warmer months of 2022 should be normal, or at least whatever qualifies as normal post-pandemic. The virus will still exist, but one possibility is that it will be less likely to make people severely ill and that it will, like the flu, circulate primarily in the colder months; some people would still die from COVID-19, but the virus wouldn’t rage out of control again. Meanwhile, Americans should be able to do most, if not all, of the things that they missed so much in 2020 and 2021, mask- and worry-free.

Of course, this dreamy era is still more than a year away, and some unforeseen obstacle could delay the resumption of normalcy. Jha said he couldn’t picture what that might be, though. After a year spent gaming out how bad the pandemic could get, he can finally see ahead to a time when there are no more catastrophes to imagine.

JOE PINSKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers families and relationships.

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From the New Yorker online. Somebody sent me one of these and I liked it … this article explained … why now … these twins ? Hope you enjoy

This August—normally a bountiful month in which tomatoes ripen on the vine, hydrangea bushes sag with extravagant blooms, and the sunsets can be nearly psychedelic—I have found it difficult to hold on to a good feeling. For a lot of Americans, this particular summer has been a season of fear and concern—or, at best, a kind of endless, anxious boredom. But one small, pure, reliable pleasure remains: the giddiness of hearing a completely awesome song for the very first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l3-iufiywU

For almost a year, Tim and Fred Williams, twenty-one-year-old twins from Gary, Indiana, have made videos of themselves listening to famous songs, and then uploading the videos to their YouTube channel. They sit in elaborate, side-by-side desk chairs, situated in front of a sometimes-unmade bed. Posters of the rapper Tupac Shakur and the boxer Deontay Wilder are taped to a wood-panelled wall behind them. Most of the songs that they choose to play have been suggested by subscribers, and they range from very recent hits to genuine oldies. When I was a teen-ager, certain songs were simply inescapable—they were played endlessly on the radio, or at the mall, or on boom boxes at the community pool—but now listening has become a far more individual and bespoke experience. It’s not unusual for a young person never to have heard a hit that people in their thirties or forties might believe to be ubiquitous. (Earlier this summer, a TikTok video of two young women unable to identify pop singles, mostly from the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, caused a brief explosion of consternation and pearl-clutching on Twitter.)

For me, the twins’ videos are bewitching for many reasons: their sweetness and good humor, the way they quickly recontextualize (and thereby reinvigorate) songs that I have heard thousands of times, and—perhaps most important—their curiosity and receptivity. These days, voices loudly espousing some self-declared expertise far outweigh the ones saying, “Hey, teach me something.” The way that the twins remain so open to unfamiliar experiences (they came of age listening to Lil Wayne and Twista but appear genuinely interested in all kinds of music) seems like a rare gift. Graciously and eagerly receiving a recommendation is often a far more generous act than giving one.

Even when the Williams twins do not seem especially worked up about a track, they listen carefully, with a kind of openhearted earnestness. They recently cued up the country singer Blake Shelton’s “Happy Anywhere,” a love song featuring backing vocals from his girlfriend, Gwen Stefani. Part of the song’s video appears to have been filmed in a cornfield on Shelton’s ranch in Oklahoma, where the couple have been isolating. Tim pauses the video. “Grass is really that big?” he asks, incredulous. “It’s as tall as them! Hold up! And he’s, like, six-something—bro, you would not see me in a cornfield. For real, bro.” Usually, by the end, they agree that whatever track they have been listening to is pretty great.

In mid-June, they tried Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Tim has the kind of face that collapses fully into happiness, like a baby’s expression after he successfully knocks down a tower of wooden blocks. He pauses the song halfway through. “Dolly—you got it. You got it!” he announces. “This is a banger.” He and Fred resume the video. By the end, Fred has grown quiet and vaguely melancholy. “Don’t take her man, man,” he says. There is a whisper of “Beavis and Butt-Head” in the twins’ videos, but instead of a knee-jerk cynicism and a deep fear of excitement—the exaltation of apathy was a cornerstone of the nineties gestalt—the twins seem eager to be thrilled by something new.

Which is all to say—if you are feeling especially bummed or burned out, fully exhausted by the contents of your home or your own mind, take a moment to watch the twins listen to Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” from 1981. (It’s their most popular video to date, and on Friday it briefly caused “Phil Collins” to start trending on Twitter.) If you know the song, you know to wait for the very loud and excellent drum fill that arrives, unexpectedly, a little over three minutes in. (“We were playing with psychological things. The audience is there going along with you, and then suddenly you knock them on the head with this thing: Bvoom-bvoom!” Collins said in a recent interview.) The drum fill on “In the Air Tonight” is one of the most dependable thrills I know—a very quick path to a certain kind of heady, metaphysical elation. I wish that I had a video of the first time I heard it—what my face did, whether I made a noise. Connecting instantaneously with a piece of music can feel like happening upon a different world. The twins like the song almost immediately. “Yeah,” they say, bobbing their heads. “O.K.”

“Phil Collins, he’s killing it,” Fred declares. They each periodically pound their hearts, as if to reiterate, “I feel this.”

Eventually, the drum fill arrives. It takes a moment for Tim to process it. He gasps as if he’s seen a ghost and then rolls back in his chair. Fred’s response is more understated, but not by much. Now they’re deep in the pocket, dancing, exhilarated, happy. They pause the clip to gather their thoughts.

“That was cold! I ain’t gonna lie, Phil—you got me on that,” Tim says, laughing.

“I have never seen anybody drop a beat three minutes into the song,” Fred adds. “That’s unique!”

I have rewound this particular sequence many times, simply to revel in its hope. What if there is a song you have never heard before that could still topple you? Maybe it’s out there, waiting, the twins suggest—just keep listening.

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In case you missed this. He made her cry –made me cry too.

(If you click on the photo it will take you to the story on NBC.. scroll down and watch the video. You may have to delete a couple of ads, turn on the sound, and maybe start the video over… wish this was cleaner .. It is not his full speech but the moving last part)

Oliver graduation June 2021 Culver City, California

I asked a friend who has crossed 70 & is heading towards 80 what sort of changes he is feeling in himself? He sent me the following:

From Judy – I can’t help adding my own story here. After my mother died, and I moved to stay with my Dad a year later. He told me after Mom died, “I could be sad for the rest of my life, or I could be happy. I chose to be happy.”

Cody Matz (weatherman)

Well, take note Twin Cities. This snowstorm is something that has never happened this early in the season in 140+ years of record, and likely won’t again in our lifetime. I’m stunned how little the high sun angle and warm ground has done to curb totals. You win Mother Nature.

The Addictive Joy of Watching Someone Listen to Phil Collins