Virtually every activity that entails or facilitates in-person human interaction seems to be in the midst of a total meltdown as the coronavirus (冠状病毒) outbreak erases Americans’ desire to travel. Amtrak says bookings are down by 50 percent and cancellations are up to 300 percent. Hotels in San Francisco are experiencing (26)_____ rates between 70 and 80 percent. Broadway goes dark on Thursday night. Universities, now emptying their campuses, have never tried online learning on this (27)_____. White-collar companies like Amazon, Apple, and the New York Times are asking employees to work from home for the (28)_____ future.
But what happens after the coronavirus?
In some ways, the answer is: All the old normal stuff. The pandemic (大流行病) will take lives, (29)_____economies and destroy routines, but it will pass. Americans will never stop going to basketball games. They won’t stop going on vacation. They’ll meet to do business. No decentralizing technology so far—not telephones, not television, and not the internet—has dented that human desire to shake hands, despite technologists’ (30)_____to the contrary.
Yet there are real reasons to think that things will not return to the way they were last week. Small (31)_____ create small societal shifts; big ones change things for good. The New York transit strike of 1980 is (32)_____ with prompting several long-term changes in the city, including bus and bike lanes, and women wearing sports shoes to work. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 prompted the development of national health care in Europe.
Here and now, this might not even be a question of (33)_____. It’s not clear that the cruise industry will (34)_____. Or that public transit won’t go broke without (35)_____ assistance. The infrastructure might not even be in place to do what we were doing in 2019.
