What’s Normal After COVID?

Life post-COVID is truly the undiscovered country.

Photo by Joshua Olsen on Unsplash

In October, my husband and I did something we haven’t done in nearly two years: go to a movie theatre. We are both James Bond fans and we wanted to see the latest movie in a movie theatre.

We made our way into the theatre, put on our masks (when we weren’t gobbling popcorn) and watched the movie. When we watched a Bond movie in the past, the theatre was usually packed. Not this time. There were maybe about 20 people in the room.

None of this reflected the movie. No Time to Die is a good movie but the ongoing pandemic has made us skittish to return to the theatre. In this climate, this was probably the best time to show the film. It was supposed to be released in April of 2020, but was pushed back several times until October 2021. At this point, where more and more people are vaccinated, it was time to show the movie in the theatres. The worse of the pandemic is over, but looking at that theatre, it was obvious that people still weren’t comfortable going to a movie theatre. So, is the pandemic over?

With the news of the new Omicron variant making the headlines, we are reminded again and again that while the public might be done with COVID-19, COVID isn’t done with us. It’s still early and we don’t know how virulent Omicron will be let alone how much protection the vaccines can provide from this latest variant, but the mere talk of another variant spreading around the world makes the average person stop in their tracks. Here we go again.

Of course, life is not what it was like in March and April of 2020. But life is not what it was in February 2020. I don’t know what life is like in your neck of the woods, but in Minnesota, we aren’t under lockdown. That said, things aren’t really back to normal. Malls close early. Restaurants are short-staffed. Neighborhoods once filled with people are now empty. Stores that might have been opened late into the evening now close at 7:00 PM. Churches have lost members after a year of no in person worship.

Then there are the things that are Potemkin-village normal, meaning it looks like how life was before COVID, save for one thing that reminds us things are not the same. My husband and I went to see Hamilton in Milwaukee in October. It…