Permanent lifestyle changes due to COVID-19

[Kyng]

Imagine it's the year 2025. COVID-19 is over as a news story: media outlets are no longer reporting the numbers of cases; the lockdowns are a distant memory; and the temporary hospitals have all closed down. We have a vaccine, and our treatments have become effective enough to render the disease no more threatening than the common cold, and all the other ailments that we never even think about. In a broad sense, things have returned to normal.

However, life never quite returned to how it was in January 2020. The post-COVID world differs from the pre-COVID world in a number of important and noticeable ways. The question is: what do you expect those differences to be? What does this 'new normal' look like?

I'll start with a couple of the more obvious issues:

• As a result of this crisis, a lot of people have started working from home. Some people have been rather pleased by this: their morning commute is not a 30-minute drive to the office, but a 30-second walk from their bedroom to their computer desk. Others, however, are finding working from home to be rather lonely: they miss the social contact that they had in their workplaces. This means that, when companies re-open their offices, they're going to have a mix of people who are eager to get back there, and people who would rather continue working from home. How are they going to manage this?
  
  
• It's pretty certain that mass gatherings of people (for example, sports events) are going to come back at some point. However, when they do come back, are they going to be any different? Will there be any additional measures in place to curb the spread of diseases here - even if they're only small measures?
  
  
• Nobody's shaking hands any more. Will we ever get back into the habit - or will it just be fist bumps and elbow bumps from now on?
  

Of course, those are only three obvious areas that might be affected: there will be plenty of less obvious ones as well . So, what do you think will be some of the ways in which COVID-19 changes the world - even after the threat itself is gone?

[Kyng]

Here's another thing that's fairly obvious, but which I missed in my initial post:

What about physical money (coins and banknotes)? Here in the UK, we've been told to avoid using that wherever possible, in order to avoid spreading the virus. However, now that we're used to using credit cards and digital payments more often, I expect a lot of us will continue doing it even after the pandemic is over.

I'm sure it'll still be required for some purposes (for example, we'll still need it for vending machines unless they're re-designed); however, it seems reasonable to think there will be less of it.

[Cool Cory]

Imagine it's the year 2025. COVID-19 is over as a news story: media outlets are no longer reporting the numbers of cases; the lockdowns are a distant memory; and the temporary hospitals have all closed down. We have a vaccine, and our treatments have become effective enough to render the disease no more threatening than the common cold, and all the other ailments that we never even think about. In a broad sense, things have returned to normal.

However, life never quite returned to how it was in January 2020. The post-COVID world differs from the pre-COVID world in a number of important and noticeable ways. The question is: what do you expect those differences to be? What does this 'new normal' look like?

I'll start with a couple of the more obvious issues:

 

• As a result of this crisis, a lot of people have started working from home. Some people have been rather pleased by this: their morning commute is not a 30-minute drive to the office, but a 30-second walk from their bedroom to their computer desk. Others, however, are finding working from home to be rather lonely: they miss the social contact that they had in their workplaces. This means that, when companies re-open their offices, they're going to have a mix of people who are eager to get back there, and people who would rather continue working from home. How are they going to manage this?
  
  
• It's pretty certain that mass gatherings of people (for example, sports events) are going to come back at some point. However, when they do come back, are they going to be any different? Will there be any additional measures in place to curb the spread of diseases here - even if they're only small measures?
  
  
• Nobody's shaking hands any more. Will we ever get back into the habit - or will it just be fist bumps and elbow bumps from now on?
  

Of course, those are only three obvious areas that might be affected: there will be plenty of less obvious ones as well . So, what do you think will be some of the ways in which COVID-19 changes the world - even after the threat itself is gone?

Now that it's 2025, I'll respond with the results.

1. My dad's office reopened in mid-2021. I think most reopenee at this time.

2. Glad these came back and didn't change as a result of COVID.

3.  Everyone I know got back into this habit early on in 2022, a lot of my friends did since summer 2021.


One big change, though, is that a cricket group (the sport) that I used to be a member of, ended permanently after Covid.  I joined in early 2019, and every two weeks we'd meet up and play a game od cricket in a local park. The leader announced in March 2020 that he'd keep us all updated with when it would return, but it never returned. And at college since our course was cancelled due to covid I lost contact with a few friends who were in that college course. I wish we'd have known the course would be cancelled after March, because then we would have all exchanged contact info.

 

Here's another thing that's fairly obvious, but which I missed in my initial post:

What about physical money (coins and banknotes)? Here in the UK, we've been told to avoid using that wherever possible, in order to avoid spreading the virus. However, now that we're used to using credit cards and digital payments more often, I expect a lot of us will continue doing it even after the pandemic is over.

I'm sure it'll still be required for some purposes (for example, we'll still need it for vending machines unless they're re-designed); however, it seems reasonable to think there will be less of it.

I'm surprised how many people still pay with cash at Costa Coffee. Based on the amount of people I serve there each day, I'd say 1 in 5 payments there are cash.

[Kyng]

Yeah, very little changed in the end . Even the handshakes came back eventually!

Pretty much the only cultural shift that stuck around for more than a year or two was the move towards working from home. But that was always likely to happen anyway - it just needed a push to make it happen, and COVID provided that push. But even that's been rolled back to an extent: I went back up to working 2 days a week in the office towards the end of last year, and some companies have returned to five days in the office (personally, I'm glad I don't work for such a company ).

Sorry to hear about the cricket group and the loss of friends, though . Did you ever find anything similar?

[Bryn]

This hypothetical scenario would've been far worse without the vaccine... just imagine, no handshakes, face masks all the time, the whole country becoming something like a police state? Absolutely not