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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

The days of carefree travel will return. It'll be a while, but it will be back.

In early March, looking for a park to sit quietly with my thoughts in the sunshine but away from others, I found myself in a local cemetery. Alone, but not far from a great many people.

Seattle's a pretty young place on the scale of things. I was surprised to find that our local graveyard had a substantial contingent that had lived through the 1918 flu. After noting, to my surprise, that there wasn't an obvious peak in the deaths in 1918, I sat there and silently asked a number of them what they'd tell us, if they could. I wasn't sure of the answers, but my perspective was changed.

Everything all of us know as "normal" came after a number of devastating pandemics. It'll be back, it'll be slightly different, but it will be the same.

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> I sat there and silently asked a number of them what they'd tell us, if they could.

Don't dig up my body and recreate the 1918 virus?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/523163.stm

> Because the corpses were buried in the "permafrost" - ground that is frozen even at the height of the Arctic summer - tissue samples from the brain, kidney, lungs and spleen were well preserved.

Viruses can survive in the "permafrost", because they are frozen. Pretty sure no virus can survive for a 100 years buried in ground at normal temperatures!

> Pretty sure no virus can survive for a 100 years buried in ground at normal temperatures!

I want to agree with you, although usually when we say things like that about viruses a few years later we find a class that can.

Can I just say how refreshing it is to see this perspective on HN instead of the "denialist/open-up" faction warring with the "no really this is serious" folks?

Indeed, this will pass. It's bad, we have a lot of work to do before it does. There's more suffering to come. But it's not the end of anything.

Might be the end of you though.

High-risk groups can take extra actions for defense, early detection & early treatment.

If they have that luxury based on class. Otherwise they are hosed.

One of the most effective defenses is Vitamin D, which is free if you go outside on a sunny day. Bonus fresh air. Dark-skinned people may benefit from (cheap) supplements, depending on location.

A disproportionate number of US/UK severe cases are dark-skinned people. Have you seen research into the cause?

Sadly, Vitamin D does not have a pharma marketing budget to convince people that they would be hosed without expensive, emerging, and relatively unproven designer drugs OR addressing Vitamin D deficiency in northern climates.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23119949

There does appear to be a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19 risk.

https://ssrn.com/abstract=3585561

This is just fear mongering. Life will return to normal. Lots of people swore they'd never fly after 9/11 and yet things did recover.

Maybe. Two very reassuring things happened right after 9/11, though: (1) cockpit doors were seriously reinforced, and (2) everyone realized that if there was a on-board threat, the only rational response would be "Let's roll". Some might also include TSA changes on that list.

COVID-19 is different. We're having an extended period of time to realize that we simply don't need to fly anywhere. And that airplanes always were flying petri dishes and that that sometimes matters a lot.

I'm older that most here, and it's somewhat difficult to imagine ever getting on a plane again. It's always been sort of marginal, and now it just looks like a loser.

If we actually achieve confirmed herd immunity, perhaps I will feel different.

We're having an extended period of time to realize that we simply don't need to fly anywhere.

I think we're all learning right now that we don't need to do a lot of things, but we still want to.

I can't imagine getting on a plane either, but only this year. I expect I'll be traveling in 2021 or 2022. I wouldn't even be opposed to going on a cruise again in the next few years. If there's not a global pandemic going on, cruise ships really aren't that big of a risk. I've been on 10-15 cruises and have never picked up anything. Norovirus is the typical risk, but you're probably at more risk of catching it on land than on a cruise ship. There's just not the same level of monitoring and reporting of norovirus at places like restaurants.

Airplanes always were flying petri dishes, but so are any place where people gather. It's not just airplanes and cruise ships, it's restaurants and concerts and schools and churches and extended family get-togethers. There's just no evidence that the pandemic will affect those things in the long run.

Once it's safe to do so, we'll be clustering together again, like we always have.

> Once it's safe to do so, we'll be clustering together again, like we always have.

I think we're agreeing. The question is how soon each individual will judge the situation "safe enough". The young (50 and under or so) will soon realize that they were probably never at much risk, and will revert to normal faster.

The not-young will remain quite wary for a very long time, partly because old people are risk-averse to begin with, and partly because they are at higher risk from COVID-19 specifically.

Economic factors will play a large role as well. Most of us are realizing (faster or slower) that we just got whacked financially. Many have lost jobs, had their retirement accounts depleted, or suffered other downsides. And as a society we will be paying for this for decades in terms of higher taxes, lower services and social safety nets.

Teaching passengers to wear masks when sick, wash their hands, etc., is the "let's roll" of COVID-19. A vaccine will be the reinforced cockpit doors of COVID-19. For most people, in 3 years, we'll be right back to where we were.

I don't see how airplanes are any more "petri dishes" than buses, trains, theatres, stadiums, conventions, churches, restaurants, or the DMV. (We're not going to start building everything 4x bigger in every dimension just so people can safely sneeze at an IMAX screening.) Instead of seeing that they don't need to fly, they'll see that flying is no worse than 20 other things they do.

We just have to hope that the government doesn't take advantage of the situation to create a TSA of COVID-19, with mandatory worse-than-useless "health theater".

Cockpit doors were pretty straightforward and appeared almost immediately. There's a pretty good chance we will never have an effective COVID-19 vaccine. No knowledgeable scientist thinks it's a sure thing, nor that it will be widely available anytime soon.

Airplanes are uniquely awful in that people are packed closely together and the air is almost entirely recirculated. Nothing else even comes close.

Every little dribble of terrorism made flying a lot worse. (An infinitesimally small one of the reasons to curse Richard Reid.) Just imagine every way flying will get worse when future diseases flare up, and diseases aren't limited by human resourcefulness as terrorism is.

Things in air travel did not go back to normal though.

Cockpit doors were reinforced, with nobody allowed in during flights.

Things on the ground were even more changed, with security still heightened to this day (even if much of it is theatre). AFAIK, it was also around then that tickets became non-transferable. People's luggage can no longer travel with out them. We have 3D body scanners and can only carry small quantities of liquids in a tiny bag (I realise this came a bit later, but the point stands). Being brown results in even more unpleasantness.

Things absolutely did not return to normal after 9/11.

Personally, I think it will have permanent effects on airport operations.

Some of the steps like social distancing, wearing masks, temperature checks, sanitizers, etc will remain even after the vaccine is found.

And scary side thing to consider.. how many corona-virus vaccines have been developed and deployed to date?

Even after SARS (another corona virus), there were a bunch of candidates and some preliminary successes but none actually made it to market because interest (aka funding) subsided. The same over and over again.

As of Jan 1, there were zero. People predicting "we'll have one in a year!" is based on hope and other models, not corona-oriented vaccines. :(

There are over 100 vaccines in development, several have completed phase 1 trials, and one is actually in production already so it will be available when it completes phase 3.

We didn't need vaccines for SARS or MERS because they were both gone pretty quickly and the number of affected individuals was never high enough to warrant completing the expensive testing required to get approval for a vaccine.

Yes, exactly. I hope a) those vaccines yield useful results b) quickly enough before people lose interest and funding.

They don't lose interest like it's some unstoppable force of nature on a timer. They lose interest if the harm caused by the disease is either low or contained. As long as the world continues to experience significant death, impact on the health care system, and economic damage... there will be interest in a vaccine.

Zero in humans. There are vaccines for specific coronaviruses (coronavirii?) in dogs and pigs.

I don't believe social distancing on airlines is going to happen for any length of time - the airline industry is a large one, and they will never stand for it.

I'd be surprised. Social distancing is inconvenient, masks are uncomfortable, etc. Things will go back to normal.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/seattles-quick-thinking-191...

We can turn to history to get a sense of what they might have told us. Seattle acted quickly and swiftly, and the damage was mitigated. Compare that to Philadelphia, where it wasnt. And ultimately, research into influenza led to confirming the causative agent and developing the first effective influenza vaccines. We learned, we adapted, and we fought back. Don't know how long it will take, but it's good to remember that for the past few dozen millenia, the lack of fear of pandemics was not normal. The normal we are trying to return to is a new normal created by our species unwillingness to let infectious disease have the last word.

> After noting, to my surprise, that there wasn't an obvious peak in the deaths in 1918

Well, you've seen photos of mass graves circa this year, right?

True.

More detail https://gothamist.com/news/mass-burials-hart-island-increase...

To be clear, regular mass burials on Hart Island is normalcy. The increased rate of mass burials is the notable part.

There will be some sense of normalcy, but not the old normal. For example, even an event like 9/11, which is small in the scale of a pandemic, had deep consequences for travel and related industries. There will be traveling after the current pandemic, but it will be much different from what we're used to.

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