Missing going to concerts, sports games and other large events?
Better get use to it, says Zeke Emanuel, noting that it could be a much longer wait than many suspect before those things return to our lives.
Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives and director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and host of the coronvirus podcast “Making the Call,” tells the New York Times it could be well over a year before we’re going to concerts and sporting events again.
“Larger gatherings — conferences, concerts, sporting events — when people say they’re going to reschedule this conference or graduation event for October 2020, I have no idea how they think that’s a plausible possibility,” he is quoted as saying. “I think those things will be the last to return. Realistically we’re talking fall 2021 at the earliest.”
Emmanuel, who was part of a panel of experts put together by the newspaper to discuss topics involving COVID-19, paints a somewhat brighter picture for the restaurant industry.
“Restaurants where you can space tables out, maybe sooner (than concerts, sports),” he says. “In Hong Kong, Singapore and other places, we’re seeing resurgences (in COVID-19 cases) when they open up and allow more activity. It’s going to be this roller coaster, up and down. The question is: When it goes up, can we do better testing and contact tracing so that we can focus on particular people and isolate them and not have to reimpose shelter-in-place for everyone as we did before?”
Ann Case, an emeritus professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and co-author of the recent book “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” says the lingering effect on the restaurant industry and surrounding economy should be felt for quite some time.
“The idea that tables could be spread far enough apart that it would be safe to open restaurants — maybe that’ll happen in many cities, but it seems highly unlikely that sector will bounce back, which means there are all these service workers who are not going to find work in the sector they were working in,” she tells the New York Times in the same article. “Losing that for 18 months, that’s enormous.
“Eventually, when the time comes for people to go back to work, I worry that some large fraction of working-class people won’t have work to go back to.”
