Hand flipping wooden block cubes for new normal wording. The world is changing to balance it into new normal include business , economy , environment and health.
Our last Pfizer vaccine was on March 24. Two weeks later, on April 7, we were officially bolstered against Covid – but maybe not. No one knows yet for sure how long the vaccines are good for.
But I did two things that haven’t happened in more than a year – I returned to the gym, working out masked, and went to the mall, also masked, Until my third visit, the gym was great. Not many people there and most of us wore masks while working out. One employee is tasked with wiping down each piece of equipment with disinfectant, the handrails on the stairs, the counters, everything. But on Saturday, a couple of young men showed up maskless, so I left.
The mall: ours is dying. It went up in 2001, had fabulous stores, and now, 20 years later, it’s dying a slow, agonizing death from the pandemic because Amazon is king. Why go anywhere when you can sit down in front of your computer and browse and click for whatever you want and it’s on your doorstep the next day?
The busiest store in our mall was Apple. People were hanging outside the store while an Apple employee went around, jotting down names and reasons people were there. In Chico’s, where I went, the clerk and I were the only ones in the store and we discovered neither of us was ever a fan of trump’s. Good start. It was strange and wonderful to actually try on clothes.
I’ve done a lot of returns to Amazon because that try on thing doesn’t exist. Maybe it will someday, when some whiz kid makes a holographic experience shopping experience real. We also got together for a dinner with vaccinated friends where none of us wore masks.
Throughout the pandemic, except for a month when Florida closed everything, even dog parks, we’ve gone maskless to the huge dog park here. It’s easy to social distance. Now most of us in our mid-afternoon group have gotten at least one vax. We share our experiences – Pfizer, Moderna, J&J. Where and when. And we are grateful for every second that we don’t hear trump dominating the news.
Some of us are planning trips – mostly in the U.S. but also to foreign countries. The artistic woman who cuts and colors my hair is headed to Brazil with her husband to pick up his mother and bring her stateside for several months. They’re also going to L.A. to see her son, whom she hasn’t seen since the pandemic started.
In other words, a return to normal isn’t normal. It’s part of the new normal, which is still revealing itself to us.
Trish,
Robb,
Believe and win!
it is an old roman ( maybe greek) saying. Be mindful, exercise, try to have some type of human contact.
the amount of computational horsepower that is being brought to bear on this problem is immense. Science, math, compute cycles and now with the recent reports of AI/ML doing massive runs on if a drug can work should give one not hope but maybe some sort of relief that this is not being back burnered as 45th did.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-releases-artificial-intelligencemachine-learning-action-plan
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359644621000404
https://medicalstartups.org/top/ai/
https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/as1p81um/release/3
hopefully the above links will give you a sense of the magnitude of people/ tech/ research facilities that are not stopping or slowing down.
look up proteomes and genomics, support those doing this if you can, stay aware.
be well
Laurence
Honestly, the malls have been dying for some time, even before Covid. For me personally I found the prices rising and the quality going down. Also the shops were geared to teenagers. It’s true Amazon and other online stores have caused much of the decline of physical stores but I also find myself buying more merchandise online because when I do go to the physical stores they never seem to have the right size or the right color or even the item I went there for. I go online (even to Chico’s) and I get exactly what I’m looking for and it arrives at my doorstep often the very next day and I don’t have to fight for a parking spot.
As for the virus, don’t lose hope. We still don’t really know how long the vaccine will remain effective but every day they are learning more and more how to treat patients who have already caught it. It is sad to know that so many more people have died because of Trumps mishandling of the pandemic. It’s also sad that to this day so many people don’t take the science seriously.
I hate to rain on the “new normal” parade, but this news story doesn’t sound good for the next few years ahead –
” “The pandemic is nowhere near finished. Each week we have seen four and a half million cases being reported and know those are an enormous underestimate,” he warned.
“And we are still seeing a really significant number of deaths – nearly three million.
“What I want to stress is that the pandemic is surging forward everywhere.”
Dr Tony Lockett, from King’s College London’s Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, previously told The Sun Online about the prospect of a devastating new mutation emerging from the rampant spread worldwide.
“The effect – well it could be devastating – much worse than the original as younger people could become sicker and those who have had the virus get reinfected with the new strain,” he said.
“It’s really very scary.”
His comments come as it was warned coronavirus mutations could render vaccines redundant in less than one year, according to a survey of epidemiologists by The People’s Vaccine Alliance. ”
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/health/scientists-horror-over-escape-mutation-of-new-covid-strain/news-story/f7627d86515862ebc1fe5815d689123f
The pessimist in me agrees with you, Daz. I’m trying to be optimistic!!
I just say make hay while the sun shines.
We are doing OK in Australia so far by keeping the virus out, or contained when small outbreaks occur.
But without a decent vaccine roll-out over here until the end of the year it’s like being the little Dutch boy with his finger in a cracking COVID dam wall.
This weekend the MCG in Melbourne will have 100,000 spectators for the first time since the pandemic began shutting football down in Australia.
I just wonder how long until we will be back to no spectators again … or worse … no football at all?
And the restaurants, bars and coffee shops closed once more?
I just take life on a day to day, week to week basis and thank my lucky stars when things turn out good like they were in the old pre- 2020 days gone by.
A decade ago the El Con Mall in Tucson was torn down, replaced with Walmart and other big box stores. There is nothing there any more except them, not even a coffee stand or restaurant. Beyond Covid, increasingly I think we are becoming a world that stays inside and lives on the internet. I am not comfortable with that because I’m old, and remember a different time, a time when I felt people talked to people more. But the world is changing.
I do think the art of conversation is transmuting!
I guess I never knew there was an old normal. I get your point, of course. But normal has never been a descriptor I could apply to ANYTHING that was going on in my neighborhood. My rhythms are the same, mostly. It’s just that more people seem to have adopted and now share them. It’s been years since I went to a mall. Decades since I tried out a gym. Half a century (almost) since a haircut. So what’s normal about, would you say?
Good point, Cheryl!Each of us has our own normal and the new normal – ideally – would evolve from that.
Probably it’s going to be walking around masked or unmasked.
Here, the unmasking has started already.