I don't understand why people are assuming this instead of the easier explanation of that (1) things will eventually bounce back and (2) somebody born in 1-2 generations will have no idea what the pandemic was like.
As precedent, I cite the 1918 flu. In 1918 people were getting arrested for not wearing masks. The following decade was called "The Roaring '20s," and I don't presume it roared because of all the social distancing and masks. All of us reading were born later, and if we heard about the 1918 flu, maybe in a history class as I remember, most of us probably reacted with ... "what? what's so bad about a flu?"
Society moved on pretty quickly.
Now, SARS-CoV-2 happened 17 years after SARS-CoV, so the counter-point to this argument is maybe we get more of these things in the coming decades. But. I still think it's pretty likely our grandkids forget about all this.
Edit: I guess another difference vs 100 years ago is we now have the technology to do things at a distance. So yes, maybe some people will find they prefer to do some things over video streaming and it sticks. I still think in-person stuff will make a comeback.
From what I can tell the way society is reacting this particular respiratory pandemic - and the way the media is portraying it - is completely without precedent, so we can't point to history to guide us. Parts of the US might've required mask wearing in 1918, but there wasn't the massive shutdowns of everything or the full-press media coverage we have today. I've seen people who lived through previous major pandemics say they barely noticed them at the time and they weren't exactly front-page news; you certainly couldn't say that about this one, especially after the New York Times dedicated its entire front page to (questionably sourced) names and details of people who've died in order to hammer home the point that this is a massive, vitally important tragedy.
Why do you think this is NOT a massive, vitally important tragedy? ~2k americans died in 9/11 and american life was never the same. ~100k americans have died (so far) from this and you think it's not a big deal?
This is a terrible comparison. The raw death toll was not, in any way, shape or form the thing about 9/11 that changed the planet - every flu season kills far more Americans than that, and the big flu pandemics I'm comparing this one to that are almost forgotten were firmly in the 100,000 American deaths ballpark (not to mention the even worse global deaths).
~30k Americans died in car accidents every year before this, so clearly there's a disconnect between raw death count and the "vitally important" nature of a tragedy.
There wasn't Twitter or Facebook in 1918, but the 1918 flu pandemic was headline news in every major newspaper. There were massive shutdowns and ordinances to require mask-wearing were enacted. Parts of the US came to a standstill. That we've forgotten about all of that says more to our biases and the quality of our education system, rather than lack of precedent.
There are many lessons to be learned from 1918, despite all the changes since then. Probably the most relevant one is just how forgotten it had become. If we manage to develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine, a few years from now we'll reminisce: remember 2020? Gosh, how weird that was!
There are other lessons too. Like that social distancing works.
Or that rushing to lift restrictions too soon just leads to outbreaks.
America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, by Alfred W. Crosby is on Kindle and is interesting reading.
The Spanish Flu happened before the rise of the modern welfare states. Now that the state is responsible for healthcare in many developed nations, there is enormous pressure to keep the levels of infected low in order to avoid burdening the public health system. Also, it may be that today the elderly are such a crucial block for winning votes, that politicians are under pressure to show they are protecting the elderly even if a disease has less impact on younger demographics.
The incredibly strict rules which e.g. France and Belgium instituted during the lockdown struck me as extreme and an unprecedented limitation on citizens’ freedom, but the authorities must have felt that they absolutely had to take this action. The way the lockdown has proceeded shows that the state has the necessary police apparatus in place to enforce whatever hygiene rules they want. That level of decisiveness was not present during the Spanish Flu, and so things do not necessarily have to go back to normal.
On the other hand, the era after WWI saw the birth of the modern welfare state in Europe (first in the U.K., and then gradually across the rest of Europe), and WWII saw the United States establish itself as the pre-eminent global power, a position it hasn’t relinquished since.
When it comes to global scale events, we have a tendency to overestimate the short term consequences and overestimate the long term.
Before this, I wouldn't have remembered unprompted that there was a 1956/57 flu and, even prompted, I couldn't really have told you anything about it. My understanding is it did spread fairly slowly and didn't affect the US much. Perhaps the far lesser amount of international travel at the time played some role.
> As precedent, I cite the 1918 flu. In 1918 people were getting arrested for not wearing masks. The following decade was called "The Roaring '20s," and I don't presume it roared because of all the social distancing and masks. All of us reading were born later, and if we heard about the 1918 flu, maybe in a history class as I remember, most of us probably reacted with ... "what? what's so bad about a flu?"
You can't compare pandemics — nothing happens in a vacuum. It's 2020. The Spanish flu was shroud by WWI. The Roaring 20s was a post-war boom, meanwhile we haven't even fought the upcoming Sino war. Most haven't experienced such economic hardship in their lives. Globalisation was a pipe dream a century ago, it's now the backbone of every developed economy.
I think you're somewhat making my point though. Sitting in 1919 you could look at the horrible pandemic with so many lives lost and said, gee, life will never be the same, daily life will change a lot from this. (Yeah, I guess the war was a big deal too.) There are lots of photos going around these days saying how serious it was. Then a bunch of other important stuff happened. Including the entire lives of everybody reading this. And the pandemic from last century was not the most important thing.
How would people even contemplate changing their lives in 1919? There were no flights. No option to work remotely. No Zoom. No Amazon. No food delivery. No Netflix. No Tinder. The world was not ready. Timing is everything.
As precedent, I cite the 1918 flu. In 1918 people were getting arrested for not wearing masks. The following decade was called "The Roaring '20s," and I don't presume it roared because of all the social distancing and masks. All of us reading were born later, and if we heard about the 1918 flu, maybe in a history class as I remember, most of us probably reacted with ... "what? what's so bad about a flu?"
Society moved on pretty quickly.
Now, SARS-CoV-2 happened 17 years after SARS-CoV, so the counter-point to this argument is maybe we get more of these things in the coming decades. But. I still think it's pretty likely our grandkids forget about all this.
Edit: I guess another difference vs 100 years ago is we now have the technology to do things at a distance. So yes, maybe some people will find they prefer to do some things over video streaming and it sticks. I still think in-person stuff will make a comeback.