Life After Pandemic: What will life look like when the crisis is finally over?

Jan. 23—F or nearly two years, the pandemic has upended our lives.

Thousands of Granite Staters have lost loved ones to a cruel illness, and more than a quarter-million have been infected. Arguments over mask mandates, vaccines and medical treatment have inflamed our politics, divided our communities and disrupted our schools, workplaces and families.

Maybe it's time to think about what happens after the health crisis finally ends.

How will what we've been through change how we do our jobs, teach our children, worship our God, spend our leisure time?

Who will we be after this is over?

When the pandemic began, Anna Thomas, Manchester's public health director, went back to historical health records to see how our ancestors handled their own public health crisis. The similarities were striking.

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, she learned, "They closed down things like the library and theaters and pool rooms and bowling alleys and ice cream parlors and coffee houses, very similar to how we had to address businesses in the beginning of the pandemic," she said. "The hospitals filled up very quickly with cases."

The Manchester Leader newspaper published instructions about how to wear face masks for protection, Thomas said.

By the time it was over, Manchester had lost 527 residents to the Spanish flu. To date, the city has lost 282 residents to COVID-19, Thomas said.

What the city went through back then, she said, "really put an emphasis on the health of the community, and a new value on how important it is to maintain the health of the community. It's probably one of the greatest responsibilities of any government, any system: to maintain the health of the citizenry."

Thomas said she hopes we take similar lessons from what we're going through now.

"When these unfortunate major events happen in the community, it does remind us how we take our health for granted," Thomas said. "And I think back then, it taught everyone a very quick lesson of how easily our everyday lives can be changed when things are not well-prevented or averted and we're not prepared."

The current crisis, Thomas said, has been hardest on the oldest and youngest among us. She called for a greater focus on the importance of mental health in overall health.

"A community is healthy when its most vulnerable are healthy," Thomas said.

How we move on

Dr. Erik Shessler, associate medical director of pediatrics at Children's Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock in Manchester, said much remains uncertain about where the pandemic is heading. "Is the next variant going to be as contagious? Is it going to cause more of an illness?" he asked. "We don't know some of those kinds of factors.

"There is some thought that maybe we'll get lucky and omicron is so contagious that we actually create a herd immunity because everybody got it," Shessler said.

Still, it's likely that in the future, there will be annual COVID vaccines — much like the flu shots available every year, he said. He expects that over time, the divisiveness around vaccines may subside as more data about the safety of the vaccines become available.

"Sometimes people are uncomfortable because of the new aspect," he said. "In the future, the answer is it's not new anymore, so some of that becomes a little more comfortable over time."

Likewise, it may be more common to see kids and adults wearing face masks to school, work and indoor events during colder months — a good way to prevent colds and the flu whether or not COVID is still around, Shessler said. "Maybe we shouldn't be spreading generic germs as liberally as we were before," he said.

How we work

The world of work has been changed forever by the pandemic, said Rick Fabrizio, director of communications and public policy for the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire. "I think that the remote work that you're seeing in many different industries is certainly here to stay, to one degree or another," he said.

If workforce shortages continue, he said, "I think that companies that are able to incorporate continued remote work possibilities, and the ones that are nimble enough to maintain it in a functional way, may have an advantage over those more slow to accept the changes."

"That willingness and ability to incorporate remote work opportunities may help employers with retention and recruitment opportunities."

Even for companies where remote work is impossible, the pandemic will have a lasting impact, Fabrizio said. Companies that don't have the ability to provide those opportunities may turn increasingly to automation if the labor shortage continues, he said.

Mike Somers, CEO and president of the New Hampshire Lodging & Restaurant Association, said he thinks some of the adjustments restaurants made to survive during the health crisis will continue.

For instance, he said, "I think that we are going to see that takeout and delivery will be a larger share of most restaurants' regular business than it has been in the past."

New Hampshire customers have embraced outdoor dining, leading many restaurants to open decks and outdoor spaces earlier and keep them open later in the season.

"Frankly, I think one of the big surprises of the industry in 2020 was how many folks gravitated toward that and still continue to gravitate towards that," Somers said. "It's going to be here to stay in a lot of cases."

As for the lodging industry, Somers said some services went away during COVID, "and frankly, I don't know if they will come back."

Take room service for instance, which some hotels have eliminated entirely and others have limited, Somers said.

It's the same with daily housekeeping service.

"A lot of customers got really nervous about having somebody ... in their room: Did that elevate the risk?" Somers said. So most hotels switched to on-demand service, and Somers expects that will continue.

He predicts New Hampshire's hospitality industry will become more seasonal in nature. "It will be extremely busy during the summer season, but during those dark days of winter in January and February it is going to be much more challenging," he said.

How we worship

Houses of worship also had to change how they operate in response to the health threat.

Early on, churches and temples shuttered their doors to prevent contagion, and many turned to livestreaming their services. Congregations increased their efforts to reach out to the elderly and shut-ins to check on their well-being.

The Rev. Jason Wells, pastor at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Goffstown, expects those trends will continue after the health worries abate. "I think there's a greater sense of the true phrase that we use a lot: The church is the people, it's not the building," he said.

"I continue to be amazed at how well New Hampshire churches responded in the first place when the pandemic began," said Wells, who previously was executive director of the New Hampshire Council of Churches. "That makes me hopeful for how open to change and creativity they might be as things open up more and more."

The pandemic, Wells said, "has forced churches to be creative in their thinking, and sometimes they're finding answers to problems that are much better than the systems that were in place before."

"It takes a lot to get the church to change," he said. "And the upending of the world through COVID is one of the things that is shaking things loose in the church.

"The fact that Episcopalians are saying, 'Do we have to do worship the way we used to?' is nothing short of a miracle," Wells quipped.

How we adapt

One thing that seems to have been damaged — if not lost — during the health crisis is a sense of common courtesy. Reports of road rage, attacks on flight attendants and waiters, and just generally bad behavior have become commonplace as the stress and anxiety continue unabated.

Most people will admit their nerves are frayed.

Pediatrician Shessler said it's no surprise that anxiety is way up.

"You have things that stress you out and you have things that help relax you. It's a balance," he said. "With COVID, we increased the amount of stress and decreased the amount of coping stuff. You're out of balance.

"We're all struggling," he said.

Shessler said he has been thinking about how the "greatest generation" lived through World War II and went on to thrive. He hopes the same will be true after COVID.

"I would hope that the fact that this generation of children was exposed to a different level of stress than the immediate past generation, that galvanizes them and makes them that much more altruistic and resilient," Shessler said. "Because they've learned how to cope with a difficult time."

The NHLRA's Somers said he expects COVID-19 will be with us for some time to come. But humans by their very nature are adaptive creatures, he said.

"So I think this is another adaptation," he said. "We're going to have to adapt and realize that in the wintertime we're going to have to be a little more careful, and in the summertime, we can be as carefree as we were before."

How we behave

What's needed is a return to kindness, says Pastor Wells.

But first, people will need to heal from the harm everyone has experienced over the past two years, he said. "This is an experience of trauma, of sustained stress and fear and uncertainty," he said.

"We're all exhausted, trying to do our jobs and raise our families as though there's nothing else going on, as if we're not in the midst of a traumatic pandemic," he said. "Those are all things that make us lash out."

But it doesn't end there, especially for a person of faith.

"There's always hope for recovery from trauma. Yes, we've been harmed, but harm and damage isn't forever," Wells said. "I can't accept that we've just come to a world where unkindness will be our norm forever."

Everyone has been pushed to the breaking point, Manchester Public Health Director Thomas said. But she said resiliency comes from focusing on something larger than yourself — something she learned during a battle with breast cancer.

"Maybe the way we've looked at the world right now, of the glass being half-empty, is not the way we should be approaching each day," Thomas said. "It goes back to counting your blessings, that today I get to live my day and do whatever I can to contribute to the greater good."

The word "kind" comes from "kin," Wells said.

"If there's anything we can learn from COVID, I hope it is that we are all sharing in the trauma. We're all tired, we're all stressed," he said.

The trick is to recognize that "and to have that kinship, that we're all doing this together," Wells said.

"It makes the kindness a reality."

swickham@unionleader.com

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