Since early 2020 I’ve been telling my friends that I doubt there is a back to pre-corona thing. And I told them this is a stress test for societies, health systems, but also for the variety of authoritarian systems or non-authoritarism. I didn’t foresee that China and some Asia countries can party again while the free western world is locked in, but who would?
Has a year of living with Covid-19 rewired our brains? | World news | The Guardian
“People talk about the return to normality, and I don’t think that is going to happen,” says Frank Snowden, a historian of pandemics at Yale, and the author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Snowden has spent 40 years studying pandemics. Then last spring, just as his phone was going crazy with people wanting to know if history could shed light on Covid-19, his life’s work landed in his lap. He caught the coronavirus. Snowden believes that Covid-19 was not a random event. All pandemics “afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other,” he says. Each pandemic has its own properties, and this one – a bit like the bubonic plague – affects mental health. Snowden sees a second pandemic coming “in the train of the Covid-19 first pandemic … [a] psychological pandemic”.