Your thoughts on when life will be normal-ish

[charcb]

I realise this is purely speculative but what are people's thoughts on when we will be back to a semi-normal reality? Knowing what you know on vaccinations, when, according to you, can we expect the most simple of things to be back up and running again? I am referring to the simplest of things such as getting people back to their offices/places of work, having shops/gyms/entertainment venues permanently open, and the like?

I know we are a long way away from normal as we know it and that it may take several years to go back to it so I am not talking to getting back to total normality - ie no masks, no social distance, no restrictions.

I think this summer will be better than last, for me at least. We’ll have the confidence to mix as much as we’re allowed to (which we didn’t last year), since if the Covid we’re currently getting rid of hasn’t given us immunity, the vaccine we’ll have had by then will.

I’m doubtful that mass events will be back, that would be a bonus. But in terms of what’s permitted - at least as much as last year and probably more.

Possibly some minor restrictions reintroduced over the winter.

I’m not overly worried about new strains. They have the technology to tweak the vaccines pretty quickly, and once most people have had their initial vaccine, they could deploy the new version in a targeted way, alongside track and trace, to contain new variants quickly.

Normal ish by summer ish. I hope we can be our and about places. Not expecting a holiday though. Hoping by September kids can go back to school without masks or tests and not in their bubbles. Really hope that’s not wishful thinking?

Easter will see the slow easing of restrictions. Covid will circulate in the community forever now and some years strains will require restrictions. It won't be on this level again. I'm hopeful the joy from life will come back this year. I don't know if it will ever be the same again.

Depends on your normal and what you "see", by the end of Feb, most of the elderly and vunerable to cpvid will have been vaccinated. So while it will still be here, the hospitals won't be full and the numbers dying with covid will be low. (Other groups do get sick with covid and die from it, but not in numbers to be worth noting).

By Easter then, we'll have had a few weeks of normal numbers.

By the summer, covid will be an annoying bug that makes you ill for a few days, not a killer.

So the justification for restrictions won't be there.

May half term. Easter might have had restrictions lifted, but we'll all still feel uneasy. By May, not being worried will be normal again. Stopping panicking about it will take time. People who have shielded and had little social contact for a year may find being back in crowds and close contact mentally/emotionally hard. By May, we might have all remembered how to be normal.

This of course assumes new strains aren't new problems that start the whole shit show back off again.

@Annamaywong25 I don't know how much more we are expected to take.....this isn't living

You sound anxious. Expected by whom? No-one is going out and creating new variants to make life more difficult. It’s just what viruses do.

Most of the variants make no material difference. A few do. It’s unfortunate that the UK variant has come along just before we got going with vaccination, it’s set us back significantly. But we will get through this.

It won't entirely go away but I think we'll get back to a last summer stage by April or May. We'll be careful but allowed to mingle with more freedom in small groups, we'll have a life.

It'll stay like that, with possibly small ripples, until people are fully vaccinated. Hopefully that'll happen by next winter.

I'm hoping for a summer like last year, whether we'll get that is another matter

There is absolutely no way the public will tolerate or accept significant restrictions once the vulnerable are vaccinated and the NHS is no longer at risk of being overwhelmed. Assuming that the vast majority of the vulnerable are safely vaccinated by Easter, almost everything will be back to normal by summer, whatever the government says or does.

The big, obvious exception will be international travel. It’s highly likely that other countries will require a negative PCR and / or proof of vaccination before allowing foreign nationals to enter, until the end of this year at the earliest. The countries which have been very successful in aggressively suppressing covid, eg Australia, NZ will probably still have enforced quarantine in place.

@Delatron

Extactly *@Summerflowers101* and this summer many will be vaccinated. Yet still the doom and gloom...

Last summer I went abroad, went to pubs, restaurants, had a good time. Why won’t that happen this summer? With a vaccine??

And that’s why we are in such a big mess now-people carrying on in the Summer like everything was fine. The government fucked that up for sure.

I’m sure this Summer people will behave just the same, and next winter we’ll be back to lockdowns. Hopefully local ones, and with far fewer deaths, but lockdowns nonetheless.

My virologist colleagues estimate 3-5 years before it’s completely under control and we don’t hear about it regularly in mainstream media. About 12 more months of restrictions (of varying degrees) depending on the success of the vaccines. I think Spring 22 will feel normal-ish.

2023 at the earliest.

I hope I am wrong but I have heard from a few different people how the entertainment and culture sector in some countries are currently planning for that scenario. If is an utter nightmare and I don’t want to believe it but I can see why this might be the case. People are terrified well beyond what is reasonable and I don’t see how any significant number of people will want to go to the cinema, the theatre or a restaurant fir years to come

May!!!!!!

@jessym I think people are surprisingly willing to live in this way, or some version of it. As long as we are told to by Sage, a clear majority will support the many aspects of our current way of life

Apologies for all the typos

@bluebellscorner

2023 at the earliest.

I hope I am wrong but I have heard from a few different people how the entertainment and culture sector in some countries are currently planning for that scenario. If is an utter nightmare and I don’t want to believe it but I can see why this might be the case. People are terrified well beyond what is reasonable and I don’t see how any significant number of people will want to go to the cinema, the theatre or a restaurant fir years to come

What you're talking about there is businesses returning to full 2019 capacity and whilst, yes, it might take a few years for large venues to become really packed again. I think we'll venture out and start enjoying life a lot more (on a slightly smaller more cautious scale) much earlier than that.

@bluebellscorner you’re talking about individuals.

The economy and life will get back to normal and if certain people want to continue to hide away until 2023 that’s their choice. Once hospitals aren’t overwhelmed then everything will open up. Whether some people want it to or not...

@Megan2018 we have a vaccine. Of course we won’t be locking down for years to come. Bonkers.

I am so fed up with the way my role at work has changed only being allowed to do appointments by phone which I absolutely detest that I have made the decision to retire next month at 55. Really feel that this is not what I want but what I need to do fir my own sanity. Thankfully my pension pot means that financially it won't be much different to working but not the way I planned to end my career,

The kind of normal you are asking about by June at the latest.

Obviously total no restrictions normality will be a far bit longer. By September this year every adult in the population that wishes to be vaccinated will be. From there we be able to look at the information and decide if masks or some social distancing is still needed.

Normal to me is having the kids back at school 5 days a week. I don't need anything or really miss anything else. I can't imagine ever wanting to sit near people in a cinema, go anywhere crowded again. Its really changed me.

One thing i definitely don’t want to do for many months - if ever - is go back to my crowded daily hour long train commute. I’m certain that this is where I caught it back in March. The person 2 seats behind me was coughing on my last journey back before we locked down - it was 20 mins into the journey before I could move to another seat. My covid was mild - lost all taste and smell, exhaustion etc 9 days later - but I sometimes wonder whether it would have been a lot worse had I just sat there for the whole hour.

My personal view is that by Easter restrictions will start to ease. Normality? 2022.

I think that by a Easter, we will be back to where we were in September and, by the summer, we will be very close to normal. I suspect that people will be advised to socially distance in certain places and mask wearing will be recommended in certain settings, but that there will be little enforcement.

The outlier would be vaccine escape by mutation, which would delay things. However, vaccines will improve and that will delay things by months, not years.

It suits a certain vocal minority to say (no idea whether they are actually so hard of thinking as to actually believe it) that it will take years or forever. This gives them the excuse to disobey rules/guidance for their own selfish reasons. There is zero reason to believe that vaccination won’t work or that we cannot develop immunity to this (slowly) mutating virus.

Within a few weeks, we should be able to see the benefits of the vaccines already given in terms of falling hospitalisations and deaths.

I think summer but am not booking any holidays yet.

I also think Covid will always be around but we will just have to live with it like we do other things, we cannot have all these lockdowns forever.

@Delatron I didn’t say lockdown for years. But the vaccines are not 100% effective and we do not know if they will work on all variants. It is quite possible that the virus will continue to change faster than we can adapt the vaccine and then re-vaccinate the population. The vaccine will also need to be regularly given. To get Covid to a point where we no longer think about it will be years.
But we will have some “normality” next year. This is not my opinion, but scientific opinion. You seem rather ignorant of the science of epidemics. The virus isn’t just going to vanish in a few weeks because we have vaccines.
Hospital admissions, deaths will seriously reduce soon in the UK, but that’s not the full story. Developing countries will be largely unvaccinated for years and the virus will therefore be active elsewhere. The UK isn’t a bubble!!

I think there is a difference of opinion over 'normal' (like last summer where things felt more normal than now but there was still masks, SD, restrictions on gatherings indoors etc) and 'normal-normal' (where covid didn't exist and we could all do whatever we want how we wanted)

The former will come back quicker, probably between Easter and summer but the latter, no one knows. Things may change on some level forever, we just don't know what things and how. Or maybe they won't 🤷‍♀️