When will normality fully return?

[ThornAmongstRoses]

The other night, when I checked on my youngest son at about 10pm, he felt quite warm and sweaty. My first thoughts were one of panic, not of Covid but that a temperature would mean he wouldn’t be able to go to the childminders and I wouldn’t be able to go to work. Again.

I checked his temperature and thankfully it was fine.

But when will the time come where temperatures don’t matter?

As in, he may have a slightly raised temperature in the evening, but I would give him some Calpol, he’d be absolutely fine in the morning so I’d send him to childcare as normal and I would head off to work.

When will normality in that respect come back?

I was just reading another thread about a woman who’d been told to isolate via the NHS app because she may have been in close contact with Covid in the supermarket, and so was having to isolate for 8 days. When will this stop?

When will we stop needing be monitored like this? Where even if you may have walked past someone in the supermarket with Covid, it doesn’t matter and you just carry on with life as normal?

When does the time come where a temperature doesn’t mean we have to get tested? When does all that stop?

Honestly I think it might be a decade or more before covid properly fades into the background in this country and we never have to pay attention to whether someone might have it at all.

Nowadays we never consider polio or smallpox as a possibility when a child is ill, but there were times when parents in this country had to, even though at the time life was otherwise normal. Part of normal life was a disease that couldn't be ignored, and so everyone just had to deal with it. We haven't had that for a long time, and now we have again, and it's shit.

That time when we never have to think "could this be covid?" at all will come with covid too, but I think it might be quite a long time after a lot of other things have gone back to normal - I'll be amazed if it's any earlier than 2022, and not really surprised if it's longer.

It's been a life- and career-changing blow to society and working parents in particular. I'd like to see a massive cultural push to make fathers take time off rather than leaving it to mothers. Relying on waiting until no parents need to take time off for covid, ie 2019 coming back, isn't going to help working women right now as much as a change in expectations for fathers might.

I am optimistic we'll reach a stage where life is completely manageable and feels normal (if not quite 2019 normal) despite covid though. They did say at the start that it would be a marathon not a sprint to get there though, and we're still more in the middle of it than any of us want. The end point might be more like measles than flu though - so notifiable, still important, so can't be ignored, despite being massively controlled by vaccines. Covid might still have to be tested for by parents because it looks so like mild illnesses, but hopefully the tests will be really fast and accurate. Then isolation might still be needed for contacts of positive cases, but if there are hardly any positive cases, that won't affect parents working anything like as much. It won't stay like it is now indefinitely, even if we've still got a way to go.

That's what I think we might get to next Spring if we win Vaccines versus the Variants @Eifhe3221, but I can't quite be optimistic yet because the government seem to be planning a "cases don't matter" high prevalence strategy which as we know gives more variants of concern every chance to evolve.

I've been thinking 6 years @Eifhe3221 but hopeful about things looking loads better by 3.

It definitely feels more polio/measles than flu to me.

I think they've been wrong about the flu analogies every single step of the way.