The New Realities of Life After COVID

I went to a Friday fish fry recently.

It was back to the old buffet style food line that I remember so well. No one had a mask on. Salt and pepper shakers were back on the tables. The sneeze guard was the only protection the food had. I was fine with that and no one else seemed concerned either. They were there for the food, which reminded me that you don’t go to a fish fry to visit. You do that while waiting in line for the next round when your mouth isn’t full.

We can see some light at the end of the COVID tunnel although more than 200 still die daily in the U.S. No more wiping down everything between uses at a store such as the counter, credit card reader or every pen touched by anyone. Grocery store checkout clerks have mostly stopped wearing masks although clear plastic barriers between them and customers often remain in place.

Medical facilities still require masks, at least the ones I’ve been to. I nearly always forget to put one on when I go to the clinic. But they’ll give you one which is a good thing because when I have remembered to wear one, it’s one I dug up from a pile of used ones in my car’s center console. If I put a box of new ones in the console I’ll just end up with a pile of new and old ones.

I could avoid this with telemedicine, which is here to stay. You may already have had appointments over the phone or on your computer. They can’t do a virtual blood test yet, however.

The magazines in waiting rooms have disappeared, probably forever. It’s a convenient way to discontinue paying for any of the few magazines still printed. Waiting customers seem content to stare at their phones anyhow. 

You can attend church without masks. The common cup, though, used for communion at some churches, might be relegated to history. Each person in our church gets a small glass of their own. Shaking hands is becoming accepted again although the fist bump is common.

Drive-throughs are still popular but you can order and eat inside fast food restaurants again. Perhaps not all restaurants will be going back to inside service. One Chinese restaurant in town is still carryout only. Drive-throughs still seem busy at Walgreens and banks.

Used car prices that rose during the pandemic are coming back down because more new cars are becoming available. The inventory of new cars dwindled for many reasons including parts shortages. And those missing parts weren’t things like bumpers. No, it was the computer chips every car needs now to monitor and control your driving experience. I should have sold my car when prices were high. But I would have paid more for a new vehicle I didn’t really like.

We’re retraining ourselves to be the social creatures we were before the pandemic. I caught COVID last summer, likely at an airport. But that wouldn’t deter me from flying again. COVID hasn’t deterred travelers from flying everywhere. Some still wear masks in airports and on the plane. It’s probably the same on trains and buses.

People have been spending like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe they aren’t convinced there will be a tomorrow with all the saber rattling going on all over the world. The continuous spending (and hiring) would normally be excellent news except that all this buying is occurring in a period of stubborn inflation. Increased interest rates have not helped enough, although there is evidence that inflation might be stabilizing. And there’s also evidence that, for a lot of people, the cash has run out. Credit card balances that were greatly reduced or eliminated during the pandemic have jumped up again. 

My theory is that during the pandemic people couldn’t find the items they had been saving for. Many things just weren’t available. Remember the shipping fiasco, with products we were waiting for just sitting on ships off the California coast? People were saving their money, including “free” money from the government. Many employees were getting raises, too, in order to keep them on staff. So how do companies handle the increased costs of the raises? They just raise their product prices. And, voila, you have inflation. Certainly there are many other contributors to inflation.

We have learned a lot from the pandemic. Some people ignored it at their own peril. Others went overboard with how to handle it. Maybe we’ve learned to wash our hands better and more often. People talk at a distance but the six-foot distance stick is gone.

We’re now much more experienced in ordering from the internet and are happy to have the orders delivered. We’ve learned what it’s like to not receive mail on a regular basis and we don’t like it, partly because some of those internet purchases are delivered with the mail.

Viruses have been around forever and some are thought to have been beneficial to our very existence. By infecting us at various points of our evolution, some viruses may have altered our DNA in ways that have helped us better survive. With all the deaths and changes to our lives caused by COVID, let’s hope it benefits our posterity.

At least drinking fountains work again. Bad water never tasted so good.