Why the worst-case COVID-19 scenario really isn't that bad

OK. Let's imagine the post-lockdown world for a moment.

It's November 17, 2024. 12:27AM, to be exact. It had been a typical fall to that point, with the weather only now turning from the nippy, crisp autumn air to the searing, blistering cold that will define the winter.

However, none of that is really on your mind right now. You just got a new job so you're out with your buddies for a night on the town, with the downtown core more packed than it usually is. Everyone is out drinking and in close quarters, but no one is bothered- in fact, everyone is hugging and high-fiving and kissing everyone else (even random strangers) at rates that, five years ago, no one could have ever imagined.

Not a soul has their cell phone out, unless it's to take down the phone number of a new acquaintance. While social media isn't entirely a thing of the past, our usage has gone down considerably, as the public found they had a newfound appreciation for actual face-to-face, physical contact- and grew tired of the depressing negativity that is often found on social media message boards. Entertainment has a second boom period as a result of all this, but so too do retail and restaurants, as people have come to realize they prefer talking to a real live salesperson before buying something they need as opposed to ordering it online.

Speaking of ordering online, Amazon as a business is no more, ordered broken up by the Federal Trade Commission for their monopolistic practices. Jeff Bezos loses his fortune, but he's not left penniless, retiring to a villa complaining the FTC was really out just to steal his money.

In politics, conservatism and nationalism grow across the globe, as the 2020 crisis made people question globalization even more but, more importantly, it also made people want to limit or even eliminate their country's ability to impose the harsh lockdowns again. U.S. President Donald Trump easily wins another term paving the way for his Vice-President, Mike Pence, to replace him in 2024 (as Trump endorses him right away). The Chinese move further and further towards democracy as anger builds over their country's mishandling of the 2020 crisis and the hit the country took internationally, as fewer countries are willing to do business with them.

Only in Canada is a conservative revolution staved off, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada regain their majority government after giving their citizens a guaranteed basic income of $3,000 a month, meaning no Canadian ever worries about a lockdown ever again.

Wrestling comes back in front of fans, and the promotions finally decide to play fair, with Wrestlemania becoming a multi-company affair where the best wrestlers truly perform. This after Vince McMahon "mysteriously disappears" during a World Wrestling Entertainment taping during the 2020 lockdown. Even though McMahon is never seen again, the WWE insists all along "it's just a work and he's really fine".

As for sports, they all come back, but not like you've ever seen before. Gone are the long, winding marathon-like seasons of before, replaced with several "mini-tournaments" which offer prizes of their own and qualification for the "big championship" at the end. The sports leagues decide to operate this way after realizing their truncated mini-tournaments to end their 2019-20 seasons was more lucrative for them than their previous model, so they decided to move to it permanently.

Oh, and the Buffalo Sabres and Buffalo Bills become dominant teams in their sports, which pleases the City of Buffalo and some weird guy in Toronto. Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers do win one Super Bowl, though, the Minnesota Twins dominate baseball and the Los Angeles Clippers dominate basketball, while Inter Milan and Manchester United alternate winning soccer's top club prize.

So, there you go...that's the world on November 17, 2024 at 27 minutes after midnight.

OK...you caught me...some of that stuff I did dream up and/or pull out of my derriere. I may have overestimated how well my favourite sports will do...but hey, it's my fantasy.

I might have also let my imagination run wild on the politics front...although I'm fairly certain Mr. Trudeau is going to come out with that UBI. The Liberals have always been sneaky that way.

...but, as far as the general premise goes, that the world of 2024 won't be unrecognizable to the world of 2019?

That you can take right to the bank. You can say that about 2023, 2022, 2021 or even the latter half of 2020.

I'm certain of that.

...and you may have noticed that- until now- I didn't even mention "COVID-19" at all in this article.

That's because "a return to normal" isn't contingent on the existence of COVID-19 or not. It might not even matter how well we deal with it, either.

You might be surprised to read that. Just about every treatise you read- from your Facebook friend Joe who got his epidemiology degree from a cereal box to the person your favourite news site is calling an epidemiologist this week- has said that "we can't return to normal until we eliminate COVID-19". The dire predictions involve a world where everyone wears a mask, everyone stays away from each other and there's nothing fun we can do, among many other "new normal" guidelines that will stay in place until COVID-19 is eliminated.

Now, there are definitely things the COVID-19 crisis showed us about our society that we need to address, like our penchant for crowds and businesses' apathy for cleaning, because we didn't like it before and we won't like them in the future. I also don't think we can expect things to go completely "back to normal" as we understood things until at least the fall of 2021, as the disruptions that COVID-19 caused to the sports and entertainment worlds mean that their seasonal content for 2020-21 will have to be adjusted.

I mean, if the NHL awards the 2020 Stanley Cup in September they're probably not going to start the 2020-21 season in October like they planned. It'll be a November or December start, at least, with an abbreviated season.

...but as far as COVID-19 implementing some of the more drastic and dramatic changes to our day-to-day life that some people are predicting, I can't imagine any of that happening, even if the disease manages (in a worst-case scenario) to stick around.

First, many of these dire predictions still involve people contemplating a disease that was once a mystery to us. It involved a disease that spread quickly but what was one that we knew little about, including, crucially, how we should handle it. One of the lines of thought behind implementing the lockdowns was that we needed to slow this spread of this mystery disease so we can "buy enough time" to know it a bit better so that we can adequately deal with it.

Half a year (or thereabouts) in the COVID-19 pandemic and, while we don't have a complete picture about the virus, we do know a lot more about it now than where we were in mid-March.

Besides, as more research pours in about the virus, the better we're going to understand how to deal with it. There are lots of diseases for which we don't have cures, but it's rare to have a disease that we don't know how to contend with it. For those diseases, their infections are rare and thus don't give us a lot of patients to study, unlike COVID-19, which has literally given us millions.

Secondly, it would be foolish for policymakers to think that the buy-in to "social distancing" will continue forever. People are already flouting it now when the disease is still relatively new and the shock is fresh in the public's mind- the further we get from March 2020 and the shock dissipates the more the very human instinct to "get back to normal" will kick back in.

More to the point, policymakers have done just about everything they can to convince people not to smoke, and they've been doing it for over half a century. Though smoking in Canada is actually going down- 15% prevalence in 2017 vs. 25% in 1999, according to the University of Waterloo- it's still a widespread practice.

Plus the dangers of smoking are very "real" to the public- things like terminal lung cancer, trouble breathing, heart problems and stroke, they resonate with people and those effects are consistent no matter who picks up smoking- some just might get the afflictions later than others do.

COVID-19? Even at its most mysterious, the public still knew that 80% of all cases were mild, meaning for most people, the chances of them getting really sick was very low. The odds have improved since then (especially considering there are increasing reports suggesting our confirmed case total is far lower than the actually infected total) and the odds will always be there, no matter how many sensationalist stories the media prints.

Eventually there's going to be this realization that the risks involved with COVID-19 aren't as dramatic as we thought they were and while the outliers may give some pause, as we get to know COVID-19 more, we'll understand the outliers even more- and lower the disease's danger more.

Lastly, despite what every forecaster had predicted in March about the scope of the pandemic, we've proven that we can handle the disease without bringing our healthcare system into collapse. Of course, the argument is going to be made that without a lockdown our healthcare system would have collapsed, but that's another debate.

What's more telling is that, in this initial wave where this unknown disease hit us and we don't know bad things were going to get and all we had to rely on was forecasts...around the world, the story is consistently the same. Even what forecasters had called the "best case scenarios" turned out to be far worse than the COVID-19 situation that we actually got.

This can only mean that, in the future, if there is a second wave of COVID-19, we at least now have a better idea of how it's going to hit us. Obviously, it's still not a "perfect" science, but at the very least we now have experience and actual data sets that tell us how this disease behaved before, so we can better act- and prepare- accordingly.

Besides, while in March we could talk about administrators being blindsided by COVID-19, now there is no such excuse. Administrators should be doing everything they can to stockpile and ensure they can deal with the surge of COVID-19 cases should it happen, especially considering that our current experience tells us that any future surge isn't out of our ability to handle it, if we plan for it properly.

At the end of the day, even if COVID-19 sticks around, it's not the kind of disease that isn't something that we can't handle, if we're smart about it. A lot of its danger was due to its mystery, now that the mystery surrounding it is almost gone, this should become a disease that should be much easier to handle and live with. We as a society have managed to find ways to mitigate the impact of many other diseases that are worse than COVID-19 without having to disrupt our daily lives too much, so there is no reason we cannot find a way to mitigate COVID-19 and regain our sense of normalcy.

Obviously, elimination- and a vaccine- would be the real endgame, and that endgame gets more realistic with each passing day. However, even if it wasn't, it's still not a reason for COVID-19 to be the end of our world.

-Daniel Arnold