Pretend it's 1939, and you and I are planning a trip to Europe next year. We've both taken on second jobs to save the money for this trip and it's going to be wonderful! We'll go to Paris, London, Rome, Venice, maybe the French Riviera. We can hardly wait. Then September rolls around and WWII starts. Oh, fudge! Clearly we're not going to Europe next year, but maybe the war won't last very long and we can go in 1941. Heck, that will give us an extra year to save more money for the trip.
But the war lasts. And lasts. It doesn't finally end in Europe until May, 1945. The soonest we're going to take that long-postponed trip will be 1946. Maybe a year or two later. And when we finally get there, it will be a completely different Europe from the one we would have seen had we gone in 1939.
In a similar way, this pandemic is transforming a lot of things. If Biden is elected in November, and especially if Democrats gain seats in the House and have a majority in the Senate, that will begin the transformation of a lot of things in this country. It won't happen overnight, but we will eventually get some sort of universal health care. Maybe even a universal basic income. A lot of jobs will never come back. Other aspects of work will change. Schools may never be the same. And so on.
Depending on what you are thinking of when you say we will get back to doing things we love sooner than "years", I will respectfully disagree. Of course, even now a lot of people are going ahead and doing the things they love, such as going to bars and parties and not wearing masks.
One thing I used to do sometimes several times a week, was Geeks Who Drink. Loved it. Had a group of regulars I played with or competed against. There is an on-line version happening, which I participated in with a friend last week. It was enjoyable, but couldn't hold a candle to the real thing. Which isn't going to return for a long time because we won't be huddled in groups in a bar, whispering answers to each other before writing them down on the official quiz sheet.
Perhaps, if this country had shut down as thoroughly as China did back in the beginning, we could be mostly back to "normal". But we didn't do that, and even countries that did shut down better than we did, are having a resurgence of the virus. Even if you can only get this once, and if you survive you are immune forever, until there is truly a safe and effective vaccine, which will take longer than the optimists think, and it can be given to a very large number of people, there's no going back to things like Geeks Who Drink.
Keep in mind, that in the 1918 flu pandemic, there were already a lot of people out there who had at least some degree of immunity to that strain of flu. Especially older people, who'd been through a similar outbreak about 50 years earlier, which is why so few old people got it or died. This is a novel virus. To me what's so striking is the huge range of responses to it, ranging from being completely asymptomatic to dying. In between are varying degrees of being sick, some of which look like will result in life-long complications. Heck, one of the changes that may happen will be some sort of health care infrastructure dedicated to caring for those people.
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