When the first lockdowns ended in Europe, people started to do just that. Restaurants in many countries are like normal, gyms that I walk past on the street look about as full as they have ever been. I have spent two months of this summer traveling around, and I found some tourist destinations crowded with people who had come all the way across Europe to get there, including a lot of elderly pensioners who one would imagine would be the most at-risk group. If there wasn’t uncertainty about flight cancellations, even more people would have taken their holidays abroad this summer regardless of the virus.
Because of the high case numbers in the USA and the sheer uncertainty about the prevalence of the virus and public health measures’ effectiveness due to political indecision, I understand that a lot of Americans are panicked and truly afraid of going back to normal for the moment. But I suspect that with time, there will simply be a COVID fatigue and many of these same worried people are eventually going to go back to their same old routine.
Gyms are also almost empty. Tourism is surprisingly less affected, and I would imagine that restaurants in tourist places are much more full. But outside of those, it is definitely NOT business as usual.
Things will return to normal, absolutely. I just think it won't happen in 2021.
A number of European countries do not mandate masks at all, or the mandate is de facto only enforced in the largest cities and not in smaller towns. In many places where masks are a mere recommendation, only some people wear them and other people don’t. Observance of the "safety distance" in queues can be very lax indeed, and among the supermarket aisles people move around each other as closely as they ever have.
I am always amazed at people from the USA speaking of Europe as if everyone on this continent is deeply committed to what these Americans consider the proper public-health etiquette, but that just isn’t the case.