What’s next?

I suppose everybody has their own date for when “this” started, but for me it was one month ago today. This turned out to be our child’s last day of school, and also the day that all the world’s major sports leagues started shutting down in short order. (BTW one aspect of the pandemic is the extent to which, in a post-agricultural society, the sports calendar serves for many people as a kind of constant reminder of the passage of the seasons. In any case at this point I’m feeling like a druid without his monolith).

So . . . some questions.

(1) How will the transition back to something more closely resembling normal life go, both in terms of timing and durability? FWIW I suspect here in the USA there will be big regional variations in regard to which restrictions on economic activity are loosened, although I suspect things like big public gatherings will be gone for a long, long time everywhere.

Luckily I don’t think Trump will have much of an effect on this. These decisions are going to be made very largely on the state rather than the federal level, and even at the former level the ability to loosen restrictions is going to be strongly constrained by the willingness or lack thereof of people to expose themselves to the risk of infection. My guess is that things get back to semi-normal in some ways over the course of the later spring and summer, and end up getting pulled back in the fall, when the next wave of cases begins to build. (Obviously the big wild cards here are whether there’s an effective testing and tracing regime by then, including testing for antibodies in people who unknowingly had the virus, and whether real progress has been made in coming up with treatments, from antivirals to an actual vaccine).

(2) How hard will the Democrats push to link further federal relief bills, which will obviously be absolutely necessary, to voting by mail and other reforms, which are also going to be absolutely necessary, to keep the Republicans from stealing the election, Wisconsin-style?

(3) When will schools reopen? This seems to me to be in some ways the most crucial question of all. In a nation with no decent childcare options for people outside the upper class, and no decent welfare system to help poor people, primary and secondary schools are tasked with social roles that go far beyond education itself, critical as the latter function is. It’s a very hard question. Fortunately, serious COVID-19 illness among children and adolescents is very rare, though not unheard-of. But children can of course be vectors of the illness, transmitting it to far more vulnerable populations. Is there some way to square this circle?

(4) What about higher education? Higher ed in the United States has gone almost wholly to remote learning this semester, but that was very much a form of pedagogical and financial triage. Are undergraduates, both those now enrolled and those planning to enter college in the fall, going to be willing to pay the same tuition prices for a partially or wholly non-residential experience in the fall? What about graduate and professional programs? On the one hand, during recessions higher ed has traditionally been counter-cyclical, since the opportunity cost of going to school goes down when the economy as a whole is bad. On the other, this is an unprecedented situation in so many ways. Tuition from foreign students — an increasingly important part of many university budgets — seems likely to fall drastically. Domestic students may not be willing to travel far from home, to the extent that residential education starts up again. State and federal support is likely to fall pretty dramatically, as tax revenues collapse. The budgetary situation at many schools is likely to be quite dire.

(5) Going back to my missing monolith, when will the games come back? Will they come back without crowds? If so, when will we see full stadiums again? I keep hearing people talking about “when there’s a vaccine,” but there’s a real possibility that there never will be a vaccine, or not for a very long time. What then?