The Road to Semi-Normal
Imagining
America between the crisis and the cure.
Opinion
Columnist
·
April 4, 2020
There will be three stages to the
coronavirus era. The stage we’re in now is the period of emergency, when stores
are shuttered, church services suspended, even playgrounds closed. The stage we
aspire to reach, the stage with reliable treatments and ready vaccination, is
the period of normalcy — or the period when we get to discover what normal
after the coronavirus means.
But in between is the phase we may
inhabit into 2021: The time of semi-normalcy, when strictures are partially
lifted, the economy partially reopened, social and cultural life partially
resumed. And since it’s the goal of all our efforts now, it’s worth offering
some speculation about what that “semi” will entail.
Balkanized normality. In their “Road Map to Reopening,” Scott Gottlieb of the American
Enterprise Institute and his co-authors offer several criteria for making the
shift out of emergency: A “sustained reduction in cases for at least 14 days,”
a hospital system capable of treating coronavirus cases “without resorting to
crisis standards of care,” and the capacity to test and monitor every suspected
viral case.
They imagine this shift happening state
by state, though you could also imagine it happening city by city. Either way
there will be an inevitable patchwork, reflecting differences in both spread
and containment. San Francisco may be semi-normal, while things are getting
worse in Texas. Places with a terrible infection spike may reopen before places
that have a gentler infection curve. Rural states will enjoy a much more normal
semi-normalcy than Brooklynites or Chicagoans. There will be “red zones” and
“green zones” all across the country, with wide differences in daily life, and
much less travel than usual from one region to another.
Alongside this geographical patchwork
will be other balkanizations. The emerging coronavirus class divide, with a
working class risking their health in the real world and white-collar workers
retreating into Zoomspace, will diminish if offices and schools reopen, but it
will hardly disappear. The experiences of the young and old will diverge, with
over-70 Americans inhabiting a more enduring quarantine. And the minority of
Americans who have survived the virus will become a special class, returning
more easily to old routines than a majority still afraid of getting sick.
Life at half-capacity. Right now our institutions
must survive while essentially closed — with few or no customers, moviegoers,
travelers. But soon they will have to figure out how to reopen while
maintaining the social distancing that semi-normalcy requires.
Widespread masking may help, if shoppers
and commuters wear their masks religiously. But there will still be the
challenge of operating persistently at half-capacity — because fewer people
will come out, and because there will be rules governing how many people can
come in.
Thus
the scenes at some grocery stores right now, the line of people six feet apart
waiting to come inside and shop, may become a permanent feature of the
semi-normal landscape. Churches will hold services with every other pew
occupied. Restaurants will seat every other table. Planes could fly without a
single middle seat occupied. Sports may resume without spectators, relying on
TV revenue alone.
And since the flow of money and custom
and attendance won’t come close to what existed just a month ago, any
government response will have to be calibrated to a half-capacity world — where
institutions are technically open for business, but they still need help to
stay alive.
New ways to quarantine. Right now, if you
think you have coronavirus you’re just instructed to quarantine at home while
you wait (and wait …) for the test results to come through. But the virus seems
to spread rapidly through families, not everyone can take care of themselves
without leaving the house, and we don’t have a good way of knowing when someone
ceases to be contagious — so there are lots of ways a self-quarantine can fail.
Under the faster testing regime of
semi-normalcy, there may be other quarantine options. Just as hospitals can use
beds in empty hotels to handle surges, cities may invite the asymptomatic and
mildly sick into “Covid hotels,” where they can be monitored for worsening
symptoms and tested for antibodies, provided with food and internet and toilet
paper, and even allowed to socialize with their fellow milder cases.
The Chinese version of this
collective-quarantine system was harshly enforced; any American system would be
more voluntary and haphazard. But it seems like a plausible addition to the
“test and trace” approach urged by many epidemiologists: It doesn’t help to
track down cases if you don’t remove a larger share of them from circulation,
and you won’t remove that larger share unless some of the sick have a place to
go besides their home.
At the very least, we should expect
that some experiment as strange as a Covid hotel will emerge as a feature of
semi-normalcy. Because that’s what the “semi” means: A twilight zone, a curious
limbo, in which things that seemed impossibly weird will be accepted, even
welcomed, as the price of not being in an emergency anymore.
