Obviously at the time of writing, the novel coronavirus has put a stopper on virtually all travel, people are stuck in countries, others are struggling through enforced quarantine every border they cross, and the situation has changed a lot since people asked on this board "should I still start my trip?" and others said "just go, it'll be fine".

The question is, when do we reasonably expect things to get back to something closer to normal - when should we plan to start the next big trip?

My own opinion, and I'm sure others will differ (this is just for discussion, not giving advice) is I don't expect to see any semblance of normality return before 2022. I know some are saying it'll all be over by Christmas (where have I heard that before?) but this is why I think it'll take a lot longer, and why even 2021 may not be a good travelling year:

• The threat of the virus will still be out there, particularly in more remote areas, long after some semblance of herd immunity has been achieved in cities
• Containing the spread does not develop immunity and places that have contained it will still be vulnerable to subsequent flare-ups
• Only widespread availability of an effective vaccine will neutralise the threat, and news suggests that's 12-18 months away
• Global distribution of the vaccine will take several months, and may not reach poorer areas at all
• There may be a risk that travellers from afar may not be welcomed as guests but rather shunned as potential plague bringers, particularly in unvaccinated areas

I suspect hat what you have said is just about spot on. Even in 2022 I suspect that strangers will be treated with some level of caution. So I suspect that the big trips will be limited in scope - for us in Europe probably just to the EU (except for British citizens obviously ). Across the pond probably USA, Canada and possibly Mexico (depending on the election results in November I suspect) being one lump that can be toured. That said those are both big areas with plenty to see and do.

Hmm, I’m trying to look at a half full glass at the moment. There is (or there was anyway) a huge travel industry out there whose whole purpose is trying to convince us to follow our dreams, fly here and there, book hotels, cruises (good luck) or even just fly and flop for a fortnight in August. They may be down and out at the moment but those that survive (and it’s in various national interests that industries like these do survive) will very quickly be pushing their wares at the population again.

Our little niche corner of the travel world exists to some extent on the back of mass tourism and they are not going to wait one day longer than they have to before pushing sun and sea and sand at us once more. And it’ll be an easy sell if we’ve been cooped up in self isolation and working from home for months. And it will be months unless the death rates start looking like a WW1 casualty list. When we putter in somewhere on our bikes I doubt very much we’ll be met by locals with pitchforks. Mass tourism will have got there before us and greased the wheels.

Ok, the virus has done for the trip I was planning next month (April) but I’m still cautiously optimistic that my next one in August may be possible in some form - maybe 50:50 at the moment. Maybe I’m not grasping the big picture but we’ve only had this bug for a month and serious society wide adaptations for a week. Let’s see how it develops but I’m not writing everything off yet.

Depends on where you were planning to go. You're based in the UK - there might be a 50:50 chance that you could travel within Western Europe towards the end of the summer. By "could", I mean that you would not be restricted from travel by legislation, border closures, etc.

So far as more exotic destinations - Africa, Central & South America, anything that ends in -stan, etc. are concerned, I think that Des (TomKat) got it right - it will take at least 18 months, and the development and widespread dissemination of a vaccine, before it becomes safe, practical, or even possible for anyone to visit those kind of places.

Michael

Our type of travel will be restricted until our present country and those we wish to visit either have a programme of mass vaccination and the pandemic dies out (but there's no vaccine as yet) or have so many 'recovered' in the population that there's herd immunity and the pandemic dies out naturally. But by then there will be millions of deaths around the world.

The SIR (susceptible-infected-recovered) modelling was developed in the 1920 by Kermack and McKendrick along with the predictions that in an influenza-like pandemic you needed a recovered percentage of 80% to prevent transmission to the remaining 20% susceptibles. The term 'herd immunity' was coined by Captain Major Greenwood (Captain was his rank, Major his first name) in the 1920s to describe this.

I'm currently reading 'The Rules of Contagion' by Adam Kucharski who's a Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and one of the team who's doing the mathematical modelling of likely outcomes for the UK government.

None of what's happening is new or even unexpected. This is the UK government's strategy paper on dealing with a pandemic last updated 2011, https://assets.publishing.service.go.../dh_131040.pdf

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Pretty much agree with everything the OP says...

From the little bit of research I’ve done, I believe, it will depend on 1 of, a combination of or all of, 3 things.
1 - How long it takes for the virus to mutate to a milder state.
2 - How long it takes for a vaccine to be created.
3 - when governments will open their countries up for business.
Obviously, every travellers ‘take’ on any of these situations will differ.

I must say I’m missing the travel reports on the various bike forums I look at.
Stay healthy in body and mind my friends

I’ll put on my lone wolf hat.
I find myself aware of a slightly more optimistic time frame.

Apparently numerous national governments are pushing through stimulus bills for much needed aid that, conveniently, include the partial or complete removal of parliamentary approvals i.e. partial or complete removal of democracy for many months.

IMHO this is classic smoke and mirrors used by governing bodies for 1000’s of years.

The virus, which I know from first hand knowledge, is very real (for me supplementation with Vit D and oregano oil was beneficial)
The pandemic status I’m not so sure - just my opinion.

If I’m anywhere near correct the pandemic status might just fade as quickly as it emerged.

By mid to late April everything could go back to ‘normal’.

YMMV

It would certainly be nice if you are correct, but I doubt very much if we will see a return to 'normality' (assuming you define normality as the ability to travel without restrictions either locally, regionally, or internationally) until fall 2020 at the earliest.

In a best-case situation, some regions or countries will see new infections begin to decline in perhaps 4 weeks time. Once new infections decline in any given area - large or small - the governments of that area will most likely TIGHTEN travel restrictions into that area to prevent introduction of new infections.

I don't see a return to freedom of travel - even local freedom of travel - until either a vaccine is developed and widespread vaccination has been carried out, or until there is strong evidence of herd immunity, and it will require extensive testing to determine if herd immunity exists. Based on what we know today, that implies mid to late 2021.

For a perspective on travel to lesser developed countries, which are typically much slower to relax travel restrictions, consider that many lesser-developed countries will still not let you in today unless you produce evidence of current vaccination for yellow fever - even though 50 years or more have passed since yellow fever was endemic in those countries.

Michael

PS: I'm stuck in Tunisia right now, and doubt if I will be able to get back to Canada before June at the earliest.

Maybe possible within some countries, or certain regions.

At the same time, however, by then other countries/regions will probably be at peak infection rates and so under lockdown, or will have mostly avoided mass infections in which case they will want to keep it that way by restricting or prohibiting travel to some degree, especially by outsiders.

Either way, not exactly "back to normal" if you were hoping to do a long trip. Even if I thought it would be fun to travel through such areas (which I don't), I really don't want any significant risk of getting stuck in a foreign country for months on end like @PanEuropean.

Definitely a new traveller m/o needed in the future: Will they let me in without a quarantine or any other restrictions AND will they let me out again? And if the next country en route doesn't let me in, will the place that I just left, let me back in again, especially if my visa with them is now no longer valid?

Normality, that is I can travel where I like, subject to visa restrictions, will be a long way off. A comment from a learned gentleman on the TV last night (BBC Question Time, Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of the medical journal The Lancet) was that when this current situation has cooled down, there is likely to be a re-occurrence of CV/C19 later this year and possibly another in 2021.

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It's great to have a positive spin but I prefer to plan for what I think is coming. A simple spreadsheet extrapolation for the UK predicts the recorded infected cases to top 100,000, perhaps 120,000 by Good Friday. May could be several times higher.

And these are only the cases that have been tested. Anyone who thinks they have the virus and is self-isolating at home isn't included. Also not included is the asymptomatic cases where people think they just have a cold.

Some scientists however suggest the asymptomatic cases are many times higher than the government modellers believe, and if that's the case herd immunity might be achieved and cases start to die down as they have at Wuhan. But without antibody testing of samples of the general population we really don't know.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

I thought the Wuhan outbreak had been controlled by an ultra-severe lockdown? In which case it's a burnout rather than herd immunity, and there are still a lot of uninfected people out there. That's why epidemiologists are talking of second and third waves of the disease?

Only the UK appears to be pursuing a "herd immunity strategy" (at the potential cost of more than a million lives). Whether it works or not is questionable, and it certainly won't affect whether we can travel elsewhere in the world

This was written ten or twelve days ago before the recent moves to encourage self-isolation...

The UK government is being criticised for its approach to tackling the pandemic, yet Netherlands is now following the same route. This is an explanation from Prof Ian Donald who is an expert in behavioural factors in anti-microbial resistance and it makes interesting reading...
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The [UK] govt strategy on Coronavirus is more refined than those used in other countries and potentially very effective. But it is also riskier and based on a number of assumptions. They need to be correct, and the measures they introduce need to work when they are supposed to. This all assumes I'm correct in what I think the govt are doing and why. I could be wrong - and wouldn't be surprised. But it looks to me like. . .

A UK starting assumption is that a high number of the population will inevitably get infected whatever is done – up to 80%. As you can’t stop it, so it is best to manage it. There are limited health resources so the aim is to manage the flow of the seriously ill to these. The Italian model the aims to stop infection. The UK wants infection BUT of particular categories of people. The aim of the UK is to have as many lower risk people infected as possible. Immune people cannot infect others; the more there are the lower the risk of infection.

That's herd immunity. Based on this idea, at the moment the govt wants people to get infected, up until hospitals begin to reach capacity. At that they want to reduce, but not stop infection rate. Ideally they balance it so the numbers entering hospital = the number leaving. That balance is the big risk. All the time people are being treated, other mildly ill people are recovering and the population grows a higher percent of immune people who can’t infect. They can also return to work and keep things going normally - and go to the pubs.

The risk is being able to accurately manage infection flow relative to health case resources. Data on infection rates needs to be accurate, the measures they introduce need to work and at the time they want them to and to the degree they want, or the system is overwhelmed.

Schools: Kids generally won’t get very ill, so the govt can use them as a tool to infect others when you want to increase infection. When you need to slow infection, that tap can be turned off – at that point they close the schools. Politically risky for them to say this.

The same for large scale events - stop them when you want to slow infection rates; turn another tap off. This means schools etc are closed for a shorter period and disruption generally is therefore for a shorter period, AND with a growing immune population. This is sustainable. After a while most of the population is immune, the seriously ill have all received treatment and the country is resistant. The more vulnerable are then less at risk. This is the end state the govt is aiming for and could achieve.

BUT a key issue during this process is protection of those for whom the virus is fatal. It's not clear the full measures there are to protect those people. It assumes they can measure infection, that their behavioural expectations are met - people do what they think they will.

The Italian (and others) strategy is to stop as much infection as possible - or all infection. This is appealing, but then what? The restrictions are not sustainable for months. So the will need to be relaxed. But that will lead to re-emergence of infections. Then rates will then start to climb again. So they will have to reintroduce the restrictions each time infection rates rise. That is not a sustainable model and takes much longer to achieve the goal of a largely immune population with low risk of infection of the vulnerable. As the government tries to achieve equilibrium between hospitalisations and infections, more interventions will appear. It's perhaps why there are at the moment few public information films on staying at home. They are treading a tight path, but possibly a sensible one.

This is probably the best strategy, but they should explain it more clearly. It relies on a lot of assumptions, so it would be good to know what they are - especially behavioural. Most encouraging, it's way too clever for Boris Johnson to have had any role in developing.

Things are of course developing - I understand that the Govt are saying the idea of 'herd immunity' isn't part of their policy. It might have been better to call it community resilience. Large gatherings are being stopped and I understand the vulnerable will be quarantined.

The idea of school kids being used to spread the virus is badly expressed earlier in the thread. I don't think the govt are "weaponising" our children, but that at this point given they mild symptoms, infection levels and so on, there is currently no need to close schools.
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So basically, until a vaccine is developed and mass immunisation can be given, the only safe way out of this is mass community resiliance (herd immunity). If you mange to totally suppress the virus by lockdown but don't have either immunisation or herd immunity it WILL start all over again when some 'super spreader' flies in from another country.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

This is a very good article on the subject, in a respected journal (US-centric but it doesn't matter where you are, it's the same)


"When will things return to normal?
The answer is simple, if not exactly satisfying: when enough of the population—possibly 60 or 80 percent of people—is resistant to COVID-19 to stifle the disease’s spread from person to person. That is the end goal, although no one knows exactly how long it will take to get there.
There are two realistic paths to achieving this “population-level immunity.” One is the development of a vaccine. The other is for the disease to work its way through the population, surely killing many, but also leaving many others—those who contract the disease and then recover—immune. “They’re just Teflon at that point,” meaning they can’t get infected again and they won’t pass on the disease, explains Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at the University of California at Irvine. Once enough people reach Teflon status—though we don’t yet know if recovering from the disease confers any immunity at all, let alone lifelong immunity—normalcy will be restored.
Unfortunately, both of these paths could be a year or two long, but degrees of normalcy will likely be won back in the meantime..."


Read the rest at:
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/a...-normal/608752


Here at HU HQ, we continue to watch closely, and mostly "wait and see". And self-isolate! Take care everyone!

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Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
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Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com