I’d never previously considered how often people in public-facing jobs fall ill, or that we shouldn’t visit the elderly when we have a respiratory illness
It felt as if everybody had hunkered down for a long argument premised on the idea that the vaccine was years away. “It is a distant dream, therefore we should learn to live with death,” was one side of it, the other side being: “Or maybe we could learn to live with this completely different way of living?” I wasn’t expecting either to win in a hurry, but still less was I expecting the vaccine to actually arrive, not as a trial, or a hope, but as 800,000 vials, all containing something that apparently works.
And this has hurled us so fast into a different argument that even two people on the same (metaphorical) podium cannot agree. The prime minister is promising a maskless nirvana just around the corner, where we all hug and kiss like it’s 2019. England’s deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, is counselling that people may still want to take precautions for many months, even years, to come. People who miss the office are already doing that thing where their tie very subtly matches their socks. People who hated the office are pronouncing it dead. How normal you predict 2021 will be depends heavily on what you would prefer “normal” to look like. As time unfurls, I suspect that it will rearrange itself around the preferences of experts, purely because they make more noise.
