When will life go back to normal

It's endemic now. Hopefully it'll calm down again after Christmas and winter, but I'm budgeting it being "a thing" for about 5 - 10 years.

That's very funny.

Hopefully never. Working from home becoming more mainstream is the best thing to ever happen for balanced nationwide development.

It doesn't effect me because my long term housing needs are secure. But, for many, they now have the real possibility of working remotely and expanding their choice of affordable living locations. It is great for our rural villages and provincial towns.

reading this article... it seems like already ‘better vaccines’ are the answer..

they are not far away...more then 80 being studied and trialed.

About July 2021

Summers should be close to normal but I think we're in for crappy winters for much of this decade with masks, restricted capacity/hours in hospitality and of course the vaccine cert. The cert will be with us for a long time I fear.

If you posted this kind of stuff a year ago in this forum the mods would have given you a warning and it would have been moved to the CT forum pronto.

Not now.

I think summers will approach normal in other countries but not here. They've already shown that two summers in a row that they will string out measures all summer.

Pre-pandemic?

We'll get most of the way there but the world changed in January 2020. Some things are not going to be going back to as they were. What I find surprising is the lack of acceptance, in the west at any rate, of the gravity of what had occurred at the time. A pathogen emerging from tolerated wet markets in China (that's their story - there is the lab that happens to reside next door but lets give the benefit of the doubt), who played down and denied what was happening to the rest of the world, a country for 40 years the world has doing large amounts of business with.

And the implication as well because the consequences of this have yet to play out particularly in relation to how the world does business with China.

Thankfully this disease is what it is and not something much worse.

And that's the concern. If/when something like this occurs again would we be dealing with something many times worse and is that a risk the world wants to take in it's dealings with Asia generally, not just China?

The geopolitical consequences of this have yet to play out in my view.

Not sure what to tell the grandkids about this

In almost 2 years, only 1 in every 10 people in Ireland have caught a virus that has a median age of death greater than life expectancy, no notable excess deaths, nearly all deaths had serious underlying conditions, and many many cases were asymptomatic.

And we've posters suggesting we cant go back to normal.

I suspect 17th of August 2022 however it could push out to the 14th of September 2022...it's a hard one to call

We seem to be turning the corner again? so what happens when we start moving around again when everyone has the booster will it all be grand?

Tony Holohan made a brillent point last week, everyone in ICU with covid is there because of an entirely preventable virus. That is not blaming those who got it and ended up in ICU but it's a stark reminder of what is going on.

They are not there because of the aftermath of a transplant or a heart operation or a cancer operation or an accident the normal reasons why people are in ICU.

Many cancers and heart diseases are also entirely preventable. More so than covod, even, because cigarettes aren't invisible.

Todays corona poster boy (Israel atm) is tomorrows basket case. Rinse and repeat. We've been best in class once our twice ourselves, however briefly. Its been like this from the start.

Sick of this sh1t. Just let it fkn run and be done with it like England. What we've done to society, economy and everything is far worse already than covid could ever have been.