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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

I think we’ve gotta start thinking about how to make people more comfortable with living freely post-vaccine. I’ve always been concerned about this as a downside of the “this is a super terrible disease” messaging - there’s a huge range of outcomes where the disease spread is merely mitigated rather than halted, and we’ve trained a lot of high-conscientiousness people to not accept that as a success. When I see experts talking about how they won’t ever go back to normal, I’m concerned about how much of the population will get stuck in that rut with them.

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The experts are full of it if they say they’ll never return to normal. This is akin to saying “I’m never drinking again” after waking up with a hangover. Humans are programmed to quickly forget rare or non-recurring negative stimuli. It’s called fear extinction, and it does its job very well to keep us taking risks and seeking reward.

Epidemiologists likely do know something about human behaviour.

One quote from this article:

“For some, it has gone back to normal, and because of this, it will be two to three years before things are back to normal for the cautious, at least in the U.S.”

Isn't that partly just a prediction of vaccine production/uptake/effectiveness rates?

After all, if the world can only produce 2 billion doses of vaccine a year it'll be a few years before international travel is back to normal.

Some of the people surveyed may even have responded before vaccine clinical trial results came out...

In the US, the rate of passport holding is pretty low.. life can return to “normal” here without a lot of international travel. Those who travel internationally may be a different subset when it comes to “back to normal”.

Edit: “According to Census and State Department data, 21.4 million passports were issued in 2016, which is the most ever. That means 42 percent of Americans hold a passport, a growth of 15 percent since 2007. In 1990, only four percent of Americans had one.”

It's also not like international travel is zero at the moment, although it's certainly way down. Although I don't know for sure, I expect to be traveling internationally next fall.

I’d like to travel, but I’ll wait until it’s defensibly sane. It’s not like I want to visit other places that are locked down, too.

I don't know the date it changed but you didn't used to need a passport to go to Mexico or Canada. (Technically you just need a passport card today but birth certificate is no longer enough.)

Uh, you've gotta do the exact opposite: you have to make people aware that they will have to wear masks and maintain social distancing even after the vaccine, for who knows how long.

Will depend on vaccine adoption, availability, etc.

Makes you wonder if stricter measures shouldn't have been taken right after the initial spread, just like many countries did and are currently in economic recovery.

But I think this is a good reflection of the attitude I’m concerned about. If you don’t know how long people should maintain social distancing, how can we tell whether it’s the right decision and how much compliance can we really expect?

It is the right decision for an highly infectious virus, that's passed through via small particles like aerosols and affects your respiratory system.

I know that no government has came forward to say it: but the decision to live with this virus was probably the most stupid mistake of the past 100 years, and comes in the time where politics and politicians were already seen for bad leadership and for being detached from the everyday reality.

For example, in my country, Portugal, we've been struggling with this and some weeks ago stricter measures were set in place - that came very late, after the national health system was on the verge of collapsing... what's the decision for the time of the year where most mobility is registered, Christmas?

"Let's stop the measures for 2 days, but be careful."

I shit you not. The most critical time for spread is when they let everyone go to each other homes.

The reason is simple, so no one can say they didn't let us celebrate Christmas, and they warned us to be careful - this is politics, it's not dealing with a pandemic and an health system on the verge of colapse.

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So replying to your question, until there's no spread it's the right decision. Because living with the virus isn't good for the economy, and proof is countries with the virus controlled or with little to no cases, are in economic recovery (like we needed that data to know this, but still, there's something).

Making all vaccine testing data and study details publicly available might be a good start.

Having a disease ravage a country, kill friends and family, while the government does almost nothing to help, with millions upon millions of people say it’s a hoax or conspiracy, tends to have that effect on people.

The consequences of living in a failed state are something very few Americans are equipped to deal with using anything besides denial or extreme precaution. Maybe we can ask some people who survived Russia in the 90s what the right course of action should be.

In what way is the current situation in the US even remotely similar to the collapse of the USSR?

When ussr collapsed there were periods of complete anarchy such as working for the railroad that the ussr guaranteed workers pay and pension. Suddenly it was on the states to decide how to handle that. Someone’s lively hood was ripped from underneath them and they had to continue working for nothing if they even had a job to go back to.

That seems very similar to people today who have an eviction looming over their head in a few weeks and no job to go back to.

Another example is 1932 America during depression times. Hardship is all around us, step off social media for a minute..

Unemployment exists, so the situations are basically the same?

Take your own advice.

Miles long breadlines, widespread homelessness, mass deaths from disease and despair, an indifferent, ravenous oligarch class, enough money spent to solve all these problems on pointless war in literally the exact same place where the USSR conducted a pointless war that bankrupted them...

Why should our goal be a return to normal? Why not normalize wearing masks during flu season or when you have a cold? Why not mandate payments to let contagious workers stay home rather than spread infection all the time, not just during a pandemic? Why not mandate flu vaccines to attend school or take public service jobs?

I don’t think those kind of changes are what they mean. Many of the quotes seem to be expressing reluctance to socialize or be in large groups.

Perhaps more importantly, I think “let’s never go back to normal” is catastrophically bad messaging for those kinds of changes. A lot of people are desperate to go back to normal as they understand it; if we tell them “let’s never go back to normal”, they’ll tell us to shove it, even if they would have been fine with masking when you’re sick and excited about mandatory sick leave.

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