COVID renders Americans jobless; people stare at dark scenario

Washington: With life all over the world being bought to a standstill, in the US alone 3.3 million Americans have filed for unemployment last week, the New  York Times, reported.

This only indicates how grim is the scenario for a full-fledged recovery with respect to jobs and overall return to pre COVID-19 times.

The Atlantic’s Joe Pinsker mapped out various timelines chalked out by medical experts and policymakers alike. Finding a vaccine and plateauing of cases followed by a decline could take up to Spring (give the month please) of next year.

The first timeline is of one to two months. Wiliiam Hanage, of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health said that one to two months might be preferable for those who want to be out and about, but it would produce a lot of false alarms with cases. Within a month of testing, it can be possible to isolate contagious or more vulnerable people from among those who do and do not exhibit any wrong symptoms.

The three to four months scenario seems a bit more likely. “You have fewer tables to a restaurant, for instance, or a smaller number of people at a bar.”

Similarly, Mike Soto, a professor of health-systems administration and population health at Georgetown University, said if testing data indicated decreasing people’s numbers of encounters, maybe restaurants and small businesses would reopen, but large crowded events would be canceled or remained postponed. Of course, social distancing would still be necessary with large outbreaks eventually in the rearview mirror. However, it would lessen the load on the country’s hospitals.

In the four to 12-month span, bars and restaurants would be open but crowded. Public-health professor at the University of California—Irvine Andrew Noymer mentioned that large-scale sporting events like the pro baseball leagues would be out of the question.

The Harvard Professor Hanage says the following about this scenario: “I really don’t think that large crowds are going to be a thing for quite some time. It might even be (relatively) safe to travel to see loved ones. Once it’s everywhere, and you are as likely to get infected in your local convenience store as anywhere, travel restrictions make very little sense.”

The summer might bring a bit of a reprieve and the country might be better equipped to handle a new wave of infections. Although with temperatures dwindling due to the arrival of fall,  COVID resurgence is possible.

Spring 2021 is the earliest that a vaccine will become available. Even with the process of finding one underway with life returning to normalcy in small doses. Even in a vaccine-less world, reaching population-level immunity would still ensure that the US is better positioned for future outbreaks. The virus then might still rear its head via circulation and infection. Although life might resemble pre-pandemic times, it will only resemble but not fully mirror those days.