The routine will return sooner or later, but it will be a new routine than the one we are used to until March 2020. This is according to an ongoing survey of the people of Great Britain, who at first were optimistic and thought that the epidemic would end within a year, but today they realize that the target keeps moving
By Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford
No one can know for sure when life will return to normal after a certain event, and even what is considered normal continues to change even in normal times. However, it's a question we can't help but ponder – especially as new strains of the coronavirus, such as the emergence of the Omicron variant, continue to elude the target.
This is a question that the British Office for National Statistics (ONS) has also debated. On 27 March 2020, the ONS began asking a large sample of the British population when they think life will get back on track. It was a very short time after the first wave of the epidemic began, when the corona cases and deaths rose rapidly. Britain was just days into its first lockdown.
The ONS surveyed people that day and over the next ten days. Only 15% at the time said they were unsure when life would return to normal, and only 11% of the population thought it might take a year or more. The remaining three-quarters thought life would return to normal within a year from March 2020.
No one thought then that life might never return to normal. Most believed that normalcy would return within six months. We humans are (usually) an optimistic bunch.
Over the next 20 months, the ONS carried out seventy-six more surveys, usually one survey every week. They asked the same question in every poll: when do people in the UK think life might get back to normal.
By the time of the 77th survey, which ended on November 14, 2021, the proportion of people who said they were not sure when life would return to normal had doubled to 31%. The number of those who believe that it will take at least a year until there is a return to normal tripled to 35%, another 14% thought that life would never return to normal, and the proportion who thought that life would return to normal within a year plunged from 75% to only 20%. Our belief in a return to normality has collapsed.
So far the big increase in uncertainty has come in two waves. The first wave of uncertainty reached its peak in August 2020, when the number of corona cases and deaths were almost zero. After that our levels of uncertainty decreased, linearly until mid-January 2021. At that point, more of us thought we knew what might happen in the future than at any other point in the 77 polls. However, after that, we slowly but steadily became more and more uncertain about what might happen in the future. The second wave of insecurity may not have peaked yet.
We define our normality
At some point there will come a way of life that most of us describe as normal - it always comes. But this will be a new normal. An epidemic in our minds has different interpretations than the physical epidemic measured by cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Because it exists in our minds as well as in the physical world, the epidemic is partly about us - how we each feel individually. The return of normality will therefore not be marked by life returning to what it was before 2020, but by feeling that things are normal again.
In the latest of the 77 surveys, three out of five adults said they had "avoided physical contact with others outside their home in the past seven days." Two out of five reported that "only their immediate family was at home in the last seven days". None of these indicators changed from the previous survey. If, for example, this pattern of behavior continues similarly unchanged, it may eventually feel like normalcy.
On the other hand, the question the ONS has now asked 77 different groups of people (all chosen at random) is not specifically about the epidemic - it is about "life" in general. It is very likely that at first most people answered the question with the epidemic in mind. However, as time passed, other aspects of life would also change. Things are always changing. People's responses may have come to reflect this, and regardless of the pandemic, they may be defining normality as a past that cannot be recovered.
We are now very close to the point where most adults believe it will take at least a year (to 2023) for normalcy to return - or it will never return. And of those who don't think so, most are less and less certain about what will happen.
At some point, most of us will get used to the way things have changed, and begin to see the changed world as normal. For those of us who lived through the pandemic, it will remain in our minds forever. But the way we look back and remember the pandemic, and the times before March 2020, will continue to change.
to the article on The Conversation website
More of the topic in Hayadan:
5 תגובות
If there was no such thing as Gaza, then there would be no wars.
I wish this war would end already so we can get back to normal.
Amen
We need to return to the pre-Corona routine at any cost, we don't have years to waste on this epidemic.
The corona and the new variants will not stop, until all AIDS patients return to the coffin, or to the coffin, this is the goal of this disease!!! And she came to put an end to the perversions walking the human street, that's how knowledgeable researchers explain, not my invention!!!