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There are a lot of novel bad things that are happening in America right now, ranging from inconvenient to life altering. The things I've been hearing about from my social circle include major tech layoffs, inflation, and increased serious illness due to diseases like RSV and flu hitting people in unexpectedly strong ways. My general response to this has been, "well maybe next time, we shouldn't shut down the entire world due to a relatively non-dangerous disease like coronavirus." Basically, I'm implying that there's a line of causation from COVID lockdowns of a few years ago to the economy now failing, and to people's immune systems now failing, etc. Do you think this is a fair response to take? To be honest, there's probably a lot of other factors at play as well that I'm not accounting for in that analysis, due to my unfamiliarity. These factors may include foreign issues, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, leading to increased energy prices, etc.
To be honest, I'm shocked at how little C19 changed the world.
In March-April 2020, if you asked me, I thought that the gym and movie theater industries would be dead, the restaurant and bar industry permanently crippled, retail permanently shifted online, New York city as I've known it since Bloomberg would see rents crater and yuppies flee to be replaced by something lower rent and very new and different, a postmodern Warriors. I thought forcing people to abandon their habits of going out for three months would change those habits, that people with new home gyms would cancel gym memberships; that once people stopped going out to bars they wouldn't start up again.
Virtually none of that has come true. Gyms and restaurants are crowded, movie theaters are continuing a more or less orderly retreat along the same lines as 2019, there are more and better bars around me than there were in 2019, and NYC hums right along. Violence and crime is up a little in NYC, but not enough to change the basic makeup of the city, which is what I saw coming.
Even weirder, responses to COVID seem to be irrelevant, no one cares what you did or thought at the time. China has neither gained significant prestige by not having 1mm+ citizens die, nor lost it locking down in perpetuity. Neither has the USA suffered as a result of a Megadeth among its citizens, and Russia's and the EUs wounds seem unrelated. Desantis and Trump took very different responses in 2020, it seems to be a non issue in their upcoming showdown. Despite it being this earth shattering event ne plus ultra, it's irrelevant.
Put another way, the news in January 2023 seems like it would be more legible to someone who fell asleep in August 2019 than the news from summer 2020 would have been to our short term rip van winkle.
I mean, I'm seeing severely curtailed restaurant and bar hours by me still. Nothing's open until the legally mandated closing time anymore.
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