I find it difficult to ever see a return to normalcy after they now have shut down half of the society and we are facing economic depression, over a glorified virus, that in my country (Sweden) yet have killed 0,01% of the population? It's not exactly like the Spanish flu.
I personally feel depressed like the author Stefan Zweig who when the world was crashing down around him during World War 2, wrote in The Europe of Yesterday:
Before 1914 Europe (and the Western world) were more integrated than it ever was during the EU. There were no border controls, and of course you didn't need a passport. Economically most parts were integrated through the gold standard."Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. The frontiers which, with their customs officers, police and militia, have become wire barriers thanks to the pathological suspicion of everybody against everybody else, were nothing by symbolic lines which one crossed with as little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich. Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century bought about was xenophobia; morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner. The world was on the defensive against strangers, everywhere they got short shrift. The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveller, before and during every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one's hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be produced; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out, and if only one of this sheaf of papers was missing one was lost."
Like the Nobel prize winner F.A. Hayek pointed out in The Road To Serfdom (written 1940-43), when a Police state is established, it is pretty hard to roll back.
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program", as Milton Friedman said.