The pandemic has really been a double-edged sword for me, on the one hand, it's irritating not being able to move around, terrible to see so much financial distress, awful to see the death count slowly tick up. On the other hand, I've never been happier nor more productive than working from home. I've saved a bundle of money by not having to commute and that's really helping with the loss of one income in the household. Things are tight but we are certainly not deprived, it's not a "we can't do this" but a "we can't do this right now".The holidays won't be quite as bountiful financially but there will be good food, decorations, and some presents. We'll warm ourselves by the fire and celebrate the return of the Sun.

I'm not a person that craves physical company but even I am starting to get a bit antsy. I'm missing the contact with people I'm actually close to like my household, the company of safe friends not just social contact with anyone. I can make do online better than most but I'm looking forward to when we don't have to make do anymore. We are utterly blessed to be doing so well I know many many people aren't in the same boat.

Here's the deal, I don't think things are going to go back to "normal", not ever. We may not be in high alert lockdown forever but this pandemic is going to be around for years, the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed was for Ebola and that took five years. We can hope that in this case, the process will be faster because let's be real, Ebola was killing black people over there and the West is throwing a lot of resources at this particular pandemic because it's close to home.

So maybe we get lucky and it takes only two years. That's a long time not to make fundamental changes, that make complete sense to begin with because we are hoping to go back to "normal" soon. The most likely scenario is that it will take a few years to develop a reliable vaccine. In the meantime, we need to put in institutionalized processes to protect the population. We need to make working from home the norm for those who can. We need to get used to using facemasks as a lot of Asia already does as a matter of course. We need to figure out how to deliver education in a mix of on-site and remote ways. We need to get used to not travelling like we used to, Hell, we all know we shouldn't be flying here there and everywhere, and yet we still do. That needs to stop, air trips need to be the exception rather than the rule.

These are all things that will benefit us going forward, goodness knows our education is mainly used to warehouse kids and turn them into worker bees for industry, it could be so much more, it could work so much better. Spending hours on end on roads that are backed up to Kingdom come is bad for us, bad for the environment, no Bueno all round. This needs to change, this is our opportunity to change, fundamentally.

In the meantime it's gonna suck because gatherings need to be restricted to the local level, be outdoors if possible. There are ways to get together safely especially if the figures are low. But we can't keep lurching from one spike to the next because we are chasing symptomatic infection rates. Gods protect us all during the flu season which will follow on foot of a population that's tired of restrictions and is breaking them.