Three Things That Won't Change

David Perrell writes this in his blog today about New York City:

My one-liner on the state of the city is a good proxy for the state of America right now: the places where people eat and live are buzzing, but the places where people work are still dead. In some places, the city is buzzing. Parks and restaurants are packed. But business and tourism centers are still a ghost town. 

His comment caught my eye as I prepare to write a series of posts on how the now-receding (at least in the USA) pandemic will continue to affect life and schools hereafter. Perhaps we should start with a list of three things that will not change as a result of the pandemic:

1. Masks. Early on, in late spring 2002, pundits were opining that the West, and the USA in particular, would finally embrace “mask culture” in the way common to Japan, China and some other Asian countries. Despite the fact that social distancing and masks resulting in a massive reduction in seasonal influenza cases (and deaths!), everything one sees today suggests that America is done with masks. One could offer any number of conjectures on why, but it seems like the bulk of the American populous, independent of political affiliation, is in a rush to throw their mask collection in the trash bin.
2. Remote work/remote learning. By summer 2020, many forecasts said that workplaces and schools alike would never return to full-time, in-person work as before. However, even though Zoom and Teams provided themselves to be essential (and effective) tools, (most) parents were in a wholesale rush to get their children back to school, and perusal of many workplace discussion boards suggests that people sorely miss the social aspects of their work (if not so much the annoying person in the next cubicle).
3. Travel, at least for leisure. While business travel, including ours at Triangle, quickly cratered once the lockdowns began, by summer 2020 leisure travel had begun a slow rebound. Airlines re-aligned their routes to ferry nearly full planes of vacationers to locations warm and cold. Hub airports again became busy again except without the usual road warriors. What is clear at this point is that people will run almost any risk to get away when they want to for fun. It remains to be seen whether business travel will approach anything near 2019 levels anytime soon. 

What does this mean for educational institutions? At least in the USA, for starters, it suggests that less will be different post-pandemic than seemed likely in the early going. In-person school will continue to be the norm, masks will be widely eschewed, and people will vacation with abandon. As with other seemingly transformative events, the COVID-19 pandemic will be less impactful in the long-term than it seemed or seems.