The Long Tail of Covid Effects

I was in several airports over the last few days. The scene is certainly different from last year with widespread lack of masks worn by most travelers. The workers at food outlets, however, are disproportionately masked. People are starting to stand closer to one another, but the crowd outside a gate still seems to display greater spacing than in 2019.

The experience got me to thinking whether we had data relevant to whether societal behaviors among strangers had returned to their pre-COVID state or whether there seems to have been a long lasting change in these behaviors. To simplify, if we compare how people behaved in 2033-2024 to 2019, do we see big shifts?

Earlier posts described some reactions of our faculty to incoming students whose high school years were online. They have observed reluctance of students in interact in class, to engage in discourse about the material, and to profit from the give-and-take that is key to learning. This was one of the stimuli for the Georgetown Dialogues Initiative.

Of course, 16-18 year old’s are still experiencing brain development. Their reaction to the isolation the COVID created may be more dramatic than for fully developed adults.

But, it is fair to note that many working adults also experienced the disruption of working at home – the mixed blessing of no commute to the office, but the isolation of working by oneself, save for zooms.

So a quick scan of recent social data seemed a logical way to see if large scale changes in adult behaviors might be continuing. This post is a haphazard collection of such indicators.

It looks like church attendance, which experienced a large drop, has continued to decline in the past years. Those communities have not yet rebounded.

Outdoor sporting events, on the other hand, are experiencing a surge in attendance, mirroring the experience of professional conferences, both of which were switched to virtual media during COVID. Similar data come from membership-based golf clubs, again an outdoor environment.

There seem to be echoes of the dramatic changes that we saw during COVID — youth spending less time playing sports, hanging out in person, and visiting museums, parks, and zoos, while spending more time hanging out virtually, watching TV and shows, playing video games.

Movie theaters are showing modest gains recently after near-complete shutdowns, but nowhere near the 2019 levels. Such indoor gatherings of strangers remain much rarer in 2024 than in 2019.

Top Golf, an outdoor driving range and eating place, which saw dramatically increased demand during COVID, is now declining in revenue. Customers rent “bays” for hitting the balls. If a group of, say, six friends go to Top Golf, they tend to rent two bays. The largest proportionate drop in sales is for the renting of multiple bays simultaneously – groups of friends or co-workers.

There is a decline in volunteering for nonprofit organizations, food banks, kitchens for meals distributed to the poor, etc.

Since volunteering has been shown to be related to survey participation, I did a quick check on recent participation data. For several decades Americans have been increasingly not participating in surveys. COVID saw sharps declines. Post-COVID the declines continue at a sharper rate than pre-COVID decline.

It difficult to discern a simple set of principles that fit the various data points. It looks like outdoor groupings of people have recovered to prior states. Remote and hybrid work seems to have affected co-worker groupings. Indoor events seem to have only modest recovery. Of course, it will impossible to separate out the effects of COVID from contemporaneous changes in the society (e.g., recession, employment displacement, technological changes). Decades from now we might know better the “what’s” and “why’s” of long-lasting changes in society and those that were short-lived blips in human history.