When do you expect life will get back to “normal”?

My fear is that economic impacts will end up so severe that we won't really see normal again as a result for a long, long time. I hope I'm being alarmist, but my gut tells me (and my brain) that my city is hemorrhaging cash and even with economic stimulus, jobs aren't going to come back as quickly as people think.

A lot of local business owners who were doing alright (making money and paying several employees) are not at all interested in getting back to it. The risk in the next few years due to future waves of infection is too great, and government assistance is incredible here in Canada but only enough to help you limp along. That's a scary condition to run a business.

I think this will be great for large companies. Jobs and economic opportunity might relatively shift towards them for quite a while.

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see a significant change to isolation practices any time soon and the economic impacts seem likely to change our lives in a very noticeable way.

When will stores be open again, when will we do meetups again, when will we be able to travel again?

Around 10 weeks for stores and meetups, longer for travel depending on the destination.

However, Covid-19 will likely be a lesson in single point of failure, supply chain dependency, and failure planning. To that end things will take decades to go back to the way they were. Companies will not be willing to accept massive losses again, so they'll change the way they operate. That will continue until the cost reductions from going back to the way things were win out.

For some things, like remote working, I don't think we'll ever go back. It'll be a thing companies plan for, implement, and accept as normal after this.

(I'm in the UK though, which probably makes a difference.)

It might also help to consider that the current circumstances are a shock to the world (including the economy) and whatever evolves as the new "normal" once everything settles down, is unlikely to be the same as before.

I think as soon as serology tests become widely available and cheap, lots of people will get a "certificate of immunity" and be allowed/encouraged to return to work. My thinking is that in 3 months (i.e. around end of June), lots of people will be back to work.

In the US in particular, public schools get money from the federal government conditional on administering state tests. It doesn't look like the stimulus bill is leaving them off the hook, so schools have a very big incentive to give the test by the end of the school year (around 25-June). There was no official statement that state exams are cancelled for this year, and what's more my son's teacher resumed the exam prep with the kids yesterday.

So, I'm not sure when stores will open, but I give a more than 50-50 chance that schools will open at some point before the Summer vacation, maybe second half of June or early July, in order to give the state exams.

Folks are estimating many weeks, even months.

But consider: the doubling time is around 4-5 days. We'll hit 1M worldwide maybe Friday.

40 days after that, we'll hit 1B people. That's about the estimated total that typically get infected by a pandemic. Peak infection.

Two or three weeks after that, everybody will be through it. No problem; scars and health issues; death; whatever, it'll be over.

So 60 days to do anything and everything we hope to do with this. No more than that.

https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data This shows an "unexpected" inflection point starting March 28 which slowed the USA death growth from 2.7 day doubling to 3.4 days doubling. Even at that slower rate 900 million Americans would be dead by the end of May, so obviously there will be a major slowdown in deaths over the next 8 weeks.

https://neherlab.org/covid19/ indicates maybe sometime between July and October things will normalize (ICU's will no longer be over capacity).

https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ The phase space plot from Johns Hopkins dataset still shows no recent improvement of trajectory, in contrast to the NYT dataset.

My tentative guess is around June. It seems like the ramp up is slowing down after a while in a lot of countries. Look at the 'New Daily Cases' graphs for separate countries[0]. So maybe another ~1 month or so of ramp-up and then after a while some ramp down. Maybe a bit worse in the US than elsewhere.

Of course, the impact will be felt for a long time.

0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

I am in the process of asking a lot of people that exact question. Answer ranges are 3-18 months with various degrees of support. Average so far around 6-9 months.

Even if it doesn't, we can be OK. What I wrote about climate change applies to other disastrous things. It helps me more than I can easily say. http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html (a simple site)

Towards the end of this year, early next year. But nothing will be like before in any case.

In terms of social interaction, maybe somewhere in June. Economically, that will hurt for years to come.

A lot of people seem to hope the vaccine will lead to the end of the pandemic, but that won't happen necessarily. That's not what ended the Spanish Flu pandemic.

There's a limit on how far pandemics can go, even considering mutations. It's funny that when we try to lecture people about pyramid schemes, we always say : "you'll run out of people on Earth pretty quickly to sustain this scheme", but when it comes to pandemics, we forget this advice.

12-18 months

My university expects that it will be over by June, but I don't think so...

After 2 years - that's my best guess.

We need a vaccine before any: live concerts, bars, beaches, or other mass social gatherings can be resumed. That could be a year or more.

Day-to-day: When there's a vaccine, in about 18-36 months. If you look at the data, there will likely be multiple lockdowns in order to "reset the clock" on the pandemic curve, but it will probably be like Groundhog Day to lesser degrees over-and-over again with smaller pandemic curves until there's a vaccine. Overall, a million dead globally before a vaccine is deployed.

Economically: 10 years (a long time) because bouncing back isn't possible when ancillary businesses close and cause others to close. Right now, unemployment is going to around 35% whereas the Great Depression peaked at around 23-25%. This is, in essence, the Greater Depression. There were most recently structural problems and the global economy was overdue for a contraction, but not to the depths as being experienced without a pandemic; in essence, it is a forcing function that artificially-depresses economic activity in a lasting manner.

Overall: Not everything will be the same, but some things will. Don't let fear or magical wishful-thinking be guiding forces.

"The dance" will continue until there is widespread vaccination

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...

How long will millions of people accept being on house arrest?

3 years. Until vaccine and all the mutations of COVID19 are brought under control, this will continue.

A few weeks. This is an over-reaction.

The push for suppressing entire populations for months and years are coming from those that want to dis-empower these populations the rest of the time.

If by "normal" you mean the neo-liberal/neo-marxist agenda "progressing"... that is increasingly unlikely