Ways the Pandemic Has Changed Our Lives
The pandemic is over, the economy is open and everything can get back to normal, right? Not quite.
In fact, the pandemic is not over; it has just become endemic rather than epidemic. In the words of Bill Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, it is now “a constant presence.”
Cases have surged over the summer and hospitalizations and deaths have doubled since last summer and this spring, respectively. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there remains a heightened risk of serious disease and death for vulnerable groups, including the elderly, who are four times as likely to be hospitalized and those whose immunity has waned.
While the CDC’s recommendations in the event of a COVID-19 infection have changed from testing and long isolation to treating it like any other respiratory infection—i.e., stay home for 24 hours after the fever has gone—the latest COVID vaccine or booster should be added to the annual flu shot. While no vaccine is perfect and none is optimally effective in seniors or the immunocompromised, the vaccines have a good record of preventing serious illness and hospitalization, not to mention mortality.
As to the economy, in many ways it has reopened, but in a vastly different guise. Working from home is only the most obvious of economic changes, but partly because it represents an acceleration of a previous trend, it did not take the form of a temporary disruption but of an inevitability. Seniors and retirees, in particular, may view this change as irrelevant to them, but the ripple effects are moving into every area of our lives.
For employers, the switch to remote or hybrid work has meant increased productivity, not least because employees tend not to clock off as readily. It has also meant not needing as much office space. Since the pandemic started over four years ago, leases are expiring and are not being renewed for the same amount of space, if at all.
How serious is the office building market downturn? Consider the structure at 135 W. Fiftieth St. in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. In 2006 it was almost fully occupied and sold for $332 million. In July 2024, at just over one-third occupancy, it was resold for $8.5 million.
According to David Sturner, a developer whose father’s company sold the building in 2006, office buildings are no longer considered safe investments. People who are living on income from these assets will undoubtedly suffer if they do not retrench.
It is not only the owners of office buildings who will miss the daily commuters. Many small businesses depend on the foot traffic that office workers have heretofore generated. Restaurants, newsagents, coffee shops and many other small establishments are finding it difficult to stay in business, as older cities lose many of their workers. Restaurants, in particular, have been failing, as more people who began cooking at home or using delivery services rather than going out have not returned.
Those employees untethered from the daily obligation to show up have been moving out of the expensive older coastal cities to the smaller cities in the “flyover zones” of the Midwest. These cities are gaining more amenities and becoming more cosmopolitan and attractive to a second wave of former urban dwellers.
Cities are also experiencing a “doughnut effect.” Hybrid—that is, partly remote—workers are moving out to the suburbs. Either way, the gap between the affluent and the poor within cities is exacerbated. Once the bottom drops out of a whole neighborhood, it can take decades or more to recover. These demographic changes create feedback loops that are almost impossible to reverse, so that despite what are assuredly many instances of buyer’s remorse, these moves cannot easily be undone either on an individual or regional level.
What has enabled these physical shifts in employment and residential patterns is electronic technologies. While Zoom, Skype, text messaging, email and conference calling were all available before the pandemic, they were not as useful because of the lack of coordination. For a Zoom meeting, it was not enough to schedule one; the other attendees also had to log on. Even sending an email is not useful if the recipient cannot open it.
The pandemic brought everyone on board—not just office workers, but everyone: all of a sudden, everything, from medical care to grocery shopping to watching movies was available online and, at the beginning, only online. By the time medical practices, retail stores and theaters reopened, many people had gotten too comfortable on the couch to change.
Coupled with inflation, this tendency is responsible for the fact that malls are suffering—in person retail sales are up only at discount stores—and patronage at restaurants, even those not dependent on commuter traffic, and theaters have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The primary focus of the pandemic was, of course, on health and medicine, and the speed of development of mRNA vaccines not only was unprecedented but has also raised expectations for future breakthroughs. Meanwhile, telehealth has made some medical care more accessible than ever and will be covered by Medicare at least through the end of 2024.
Yet medical care as a whole continues to suffer in the pandemic’s wake. The enormous caseloads generated by the highly contagious virus pushed everything else aside, so checkups, screening tests and non-emergency procedures were delayed up to two years, and many patients, especially seniors, who tend to need more health care overall, are suffering adverse consequences as a result. Factor in the added burden of care giving often shouldered by elderly spouses, and health outcomes were often worsened.
The stress and burnout felt by healthcare providers due to the heavy pandemic caseloads have exacerbated prepandemic hospital staffing shortages. Many nurses are leaving the profession over work environment issues such as less than appropriate staffing, which forms its own feedback loop. Similarly, New Jersey is experiencing an EMT shortage. In Monmouth County alone, the number of EMTs has decreased by 14 percent since COVID and it now has the third longest response times in the state. Both volunteer and professional EMTs are leaving for the same reasons nurses are.
It is not only health care professions that have not recovered post-pandemic. At the outset of the pandemic, when lock downs removed most cars from the streets and police were leery of the in-person contact involved in a traffic stop, enforcement dropped across America and has not returned. Between 2018 and 2024, traffic stops declined from 35 to 75 percent in some areas, while traffic fatalities have inexorably risen. For all the medical advances of the pandemic and the retreat of the worst of the virus, we are simply less safe.
What does this all mean to seniors? The hollowing out of older neighborhoods, potential losses to disposable income due to dislocations in the business and real estate markets, reduced foot traffic, more dangerous streets, and lingering health problems all converge to lead to social isolation—one of the most significant risk factors for substance abuse, loneliness, depression and dementia. According to the April 2023 Social Isolation Study performed by the New Jersey Department of Human Services, social isolation, independent of other risk factors, increased the risk of cardiovascular disease by 29% and stroke by 32% and is linked to increased mortality for both men and women over 50, regardless of chronic illness or demographic factors.
If you have reached this point, you may have concluded that you do not need social isolation to make you depressed, as this article has accomplished that on its own. However, unlike major demographic , economic and labor force shifts, there are a number of things you can do about it.
The first is to adopt a more expansive attitude; change can be scary, but sameness can be stultifying and limiting. Those tech entrepreneurs who have brought us everything from cellphones to artificial intelligence and things unimaginable a mere few decades ago aimed for disruption instead of seeking to avoid it. Whatever you may think of the intrinsic worth of their accomplishments, they certainly achieved a lot of them.
Electronic media may have kept people off the streets, but it has also opened new worlds to those who have elementary computer skills. Finally, bear in mind that social isolation would not be a societal problem if it were rare. It becomes a matter of concern when many people suffer from it. One cay is just an island, but lots of little islets form an archipelago.
You are not alone. Small personal interactions in real life, from greeting the mail carrier to chatting with dog walkers in the park, can change a narrative in which you are in danger of becoming stuck. Even better would be to take advantage of some of the interest-related or educational programs offered by nonprofits or government entities that you are already supporting with your tax dollars.
Change, if not always progress, is inevitable. Over the past four years, that change has been accelerated by the pandemic. Make sure you are not left behind. 
Sue Kleinberg is a contributing writer for JLifeNJ from Monmouth County.
