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.
JOE PINSKER
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.
