We Must Start Planning For a Permanent Pandemic

With coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal.

For the past year, an assumption — sometimes explicit, often tacit — has informed almost all our thinking about the pandemic: At some point, it will be over, and then we’ll go “back to normal.”

This premise is almost certainly wrong. SARS-CoV-2, protean and elusive as it is, may become our permanent enemy, like the flu but worse. And even if it peters out eventually, our lives and routines will by then have changed irreversibly. Going “back” won’t be an option; the only way is forward. But to what exactly? Read More

What Andreas Kluth describes in this Bloomberg Opinion Piece is not a worse case scenario, it is a very strong likelihood. We do need to plan for the COVID-19 coronavirus in various mutations to be around for the remainder of this century and beyond. In India scientists recently identified a "double mutation" of the virus and here in the United States as in other countries researchers are identifying more variants. As Kluth points out, we need to abandon the idea of a conclusion to the pandemic and of a return to pre-pandemic "normalcy." For Christians the implication is that we need to rethink not only how we do church but also how we live our lives as disciples of Jesus. We have made churchgoing central to the Christian life. While he went the local synagogue and to the temple at Jerusalem,  Jesus in his teaching focuses on our relationship with God and with our fellow human beings. He ties our worship of God to our treatment of others. Based upon Jesus' teaching there is far more to being one of his disciples than going to church. This is something that we need to keep in mind as we rethink doing church and living a life of discipleship in the COVID-19 era.