Life won’t go back to normal until there’s a vaccine.

Fortunately, a vaccine is a virtual certainty.

It is no secret that wide swaths of society have had their ordinary routines disrupted or have been shut down completely. We are all adjusting to working from home, the closure of schools, cues to maintain social distancing at the grocery store, and countless other aspects of our new shared reality.

Each of these disruptions has been accompanied by a timeline. In fact, we have been bombarded by different timelines from various authorities and decision makers: school boards, business executives, the White House, governors, and local public health officials. These timelines have generally followed a similar pattern: at first they were for a few weeks but have had an additional month or two added on. We saw this from schools that originally planned for an “extended spring break” but will now be closed through the end of the school year. The White House went from recommending two weeks of social distancing in March to recommending it through the end of April.

This begs the question of what the ultimate timeline will be until life goes back to normal. The hard reality is that life won’t go back to normal until a vaccine has been developed, approved, and produced at scale.