When the first human beings were infected with the first common cold, nobody knew it would become a fact of life. Over time people’s immune systems changed, people died and people lived.
That’s what’s going to happen. There is no reason whatsoever that this virus would be a flash-in-the-pan, why would it be? It’s already mutated eight times – the US doesn’t have the same strain from Wuhan, it’s the 2nd mutation – and it will continue to do what viruses do: mutate to stay alive across all weather, regions and species.
There is no “over”, and you’re looking at normal.
Vaccination
For people who aren’t “anti-vaxxers”, in a couple years there could be a vaccine. After that time you won’t get Polio, you won’t get Measles and you won’t get C19. We have to be super-careful though, because you may also remember Thalidomide and what it did to our babies (references at bottom) – it’s become abundantly clear with the hydrochloroquine sham that Big Pharma is alive and well and would kill a random number of people to turn a quick buck. The Trump administration has relaxed a great number of testing barriers which include ensuring that a C19 vaccine won’t cause birth defects, cancer or other unspeakables down the road.
Speaking for myself, I have no intention of taking the first vaccine available… but I’m interested in the second.
We must also prepare ourselves for the possibility that no vaccine will truly work or be effective: we haven’t found a “cure” for the common cold yet, have we? This is a different virus, and we do have something for MERS and SARS which is what they’re using as a baseline for a C19 cocktail, but we don’t yet know.
Lastly, even five or ten years from now there will still be “anti-vaxxers” who think all vaccines are an evil sham. Some of them will live, some of them will die: it’s Darwin at work, and those people will ensure the planet is never, ever truly rid of COVID-19.
Something else that will never go away: working from home. People will come to like it and the millennial generation always blurred the “work/life balance” lines anyway.
Like pacing an Industrial Revolution assembly line floor, Boomers like to see their staff at their desks so they can prove they’re “working”. That horrible management tack has finally come to an end.
Education
The school textbook industry has been doing anything it can to keep alive for a decade now. With high speed Internet, PDF files that successfully capture pages and the world slowly going paperless, schools closing for months, months and months during the COVID-19 pandemic has forced people away from these heavy books and toward an online direction. There’s no replacing a social scholastic atmosphere so there will eventually be school classrooms again, but at least the only thing in a student’s backpack will be a lunch and a laptop or sketchboard.
True, some people couldn’t, cannot and will not be able to afford educational technology, but with the advent of COVID-19 the very foundation of education has been shaken, and it can’t go back. Technology will be the mainstream, and our government will be pushed to provide it.
Healthcare & Government
This has been a struggle in the US ever since the word was first uttered, but healthcare must change. Seen by conservative republicans as a privilege, business executives almost always have different healthcare plans than their employee fiefdom.
What’s happening now – and will continue to worsen past what people can presently imagine, I suspect – must be making people angrier and angrier. They’ve been sold the lie that medical insurance is a necessity while others all over the world are wondering what the hell is wrong with America.
Consider this: everyone in the US except the wealthy have been given a check for at least $1,200 as part of the CARES stimulus bill (and even the wealthy got a HUGE tax break). This cost our government $300 billion. Part of why the Affordable Care Act worked is that if EVERYONE has insurance no matter what, the premiums have to fall making it affordable for everyone. If our nation pays for everyone’s healthcare, the costs have to decrease.
Check out References:World Wealth Visualization chart, below. Other nations have universal healthcare and have a fraction of the wealth the United States has. This “stimulus” check just proved that it could be done and put a pin on exactly how much it would cost at absolute maximum. It proved that resistance to the “Green New Deal” because “we can’t afford it” is straight up bullshit.
Boomers and Generation X have done nothing to safeguard the health of American citizens. If the millennial generation is good for anything it has to be anger – anger at the fact that they can’t afford rent, they can’t go to a doctor, they can’t afford education and they can’t get a job while Boomers in our government toss them scraps. Our youth have been cluelessly kept in a media-controlled box and spoonfed garbage while being told “it’s fair and balanced”, and all the while other countries provide free education and free healthcare to all.
COVID-19 has made information available from the world theater, that media-controlled box is breaking. The octogenarians have to be actively thrown out of government before a path can be paved that provides care and education to the citizens of our nation, and the lying poison they spew acknowledged for the lies they are. There is no “debate”, there are not “two sides to the argument” and no, Fox News is not “fair and balanced”: the citizens of the United States are being fleeced and it is my absolute hope that this will be the final straw that makes the citizens stand up against the 1% and demand decency, equality and individual respect that all of humanity deserves.
If the US government doesn’t radically change in November of 2020, the United States will only see decline in the generations that follow.
Trump believed the coming COVID-19 pandemic was a Democratic conspiracy to usurp power and blew it off… until he realized he could use it to further his own power. Did you even know that immigration has been halted per presidential executive order? So much for The Great Melting Pot that is our nation – it stopped without a word of dissent and before now, he’d been trying to do that for four years.
HIPPA, OSHA and other requirements have been “temporarily” affected, and CNN even has a piece on how “it’s foolish to worry about privacy when data can help fight Coronavirus.”
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” – Benjamin Franklin
In conclusion, the future of the United States is a mixed bag but either way there is inevitable change. It’s up to the citizens to determine which way things are going to go.
References:
https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15536544
https://cei.org/blog/so-what-regulations-did-trump-eliminate
http://www.project-disco.org/competition/112113-the-changing-textbook-industry/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/25/congress-to-send-taxpayers-1200-checks-in-the-wake-of-coronavirus.html
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-anatomy-of-the-2-trillion-covid-19-stimulus-bill/
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-wealth-in-one-visualization/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/politics/trump-executive-order-immigration-coronavirus/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/21/perspectives/data-privacy-coronavirus/index.html