Since 2020, quarantining, hunting down at-home tests, and social distancing have become the “new normal” as we grapple with COVID-19. One-third of surveyed Americans said their routines were disrupted by the pandemic, and 23 percent reported that their work life was negatively impacted.
For many Americans, COVID-19 represented their first major public health crisis. Experts estimate that a life-altering pandemic has a 2 percent chance of occurring each year, meaning that today’s young people might eventually face another round of masking, standing 6 feet apart, and waiting anxiously for a test result.
Disease-driven disruptions to our daily routines is a rarity in the modern world. But for people living in previous centuries, outbreaks were far more common. During the Middle Ages, for example, people endured outbreaks of dysentery, influenza, malaria, smallpox, syphilis and typhus.
