The New Normal (Global)

New Normal 🌍
Location: Global
Definition: Integration of rapid social changes into existing routines as consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic
Keywords: Global – Healthcare – Pandemic – Covid 19 – Power inequality
Author: Dmitry Kurnosov and Anna Varfolomeeva
Affiliation: University of Copenhagen,Tyumen State University, and University of Helsinki

By Dmitry Kurnosov and Anna Varfolomeeva, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and University of Helsinki, Finland

The new normal is an umbrella term that signifies a profound shift in familiar routines. It is widespread in journalism and academia and denotes a variety of societal changes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the term acquired new popularity and a degree of formal recognition. Authorities, businesses, and the media frequently used the term the new normal to contextualize the impact of the mitigation measures (such as, for example, mask mandates or social distancing) on the usual routines and practices. While initially the new normal was primarily a journalistic and academic expression, it has spread to government communication and policy. However, the new normal condition does not necessarily result in a new social order. Critics of the term argue that the changes often reinforce social hierarchies.

The term gained popularity after the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, to describe the challenges of the post-crisis landscape, including structural unemployment, growing public debt, and a much greater influence of politics on economics (El-Erian 2010) or, in a more upbeat way, to describe the wake of the financial crisis as an environment rich in possibilities for company executives (McKinsey & Company 2009).

The term the new normal has been widely used in academic publications. For example, in political science it is relied upon to reflect shifts in consumption (Etzioni 2014). In environmental studies, the term is applied to describe the higher average summer temperatures due to climate change (Camargo and Seth 2016). Journalists used the new normal to describe events ranging from a terrorist attack (The Economist 2016) to a sports team starting a season without a long-term coach (Dufresne 2012). The term has also been used in popular culture. The Australian rock band Cog named its 2005 album "The New Normal", reflecting on the changed social environment in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001. The American sitcom "The New Normal" that aired between 2012 and 2013 followed a fictional gay couple and the surrogate mother of their child in Los Angeles and alluded that the alternatives to the conventional nuclear family were becoming more mainstream.

Some argued that the new normal could integrate the quintessential human experiences such as pain and struggle into dominating perceptions of ‘normality’ (Maisel 2013). Yet the versatility of the notion led others to dismiss it as useless, a ‘linguistic equivalent of a shrug, merely another way of saying, “Whaddaya gonna do?”’ (Pepper Trail 2018), or as able to ‘reduce a couple of words to a vacuous cliché’ (Cox 2020).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the term the new normal has taken hold almost instantly. Its ambiguity seemed to perfectly fit the cataclysmic event of yet unknown duration. However, the primary use of the term during the pandemic has shifted. It was mainly used to describe the realities shaped by a new multitude of rules and policies adopted by public authorities and businesses.

The contexts of the pandemic use of the new normal vary between countries. In Spain, it is deeply integrated into the official discourse. In April 2020, the Spanish Government adopted ‘The Plan of Transition to the New Normal’ (Plan Para La Transicion Hasta La Nueva Normalidad). Its eventual goal was to establish ‘the main parameters and instruments for the adaptation of society as a whole to the new normality’. Specifically, the plan envisaged capacity restrictions in all types of public establishments (La Moncloa 2020). A year later, the Spanish Parliament adopted a permanent law for managing the pandemic and referred to it as ‘The Law of New Normal’ (Ley de Nueva Normalidad). In contrast, in Russia in almost no instances the term (novaia normal’nost’) or an analogous expression were used in official contexts. A possible explanation are the different legal frameworks for the pandemic management used in Spain and Russia. While the former moved from the formal state of emergency to the ordinary legislation, the latter has maintained an ambiguous semi-emergency regime (the state of ‘high alert’) (Karaseva 2020). In Russia, the shift to an ordinary legal regime has not occured.

Escalating change can lead to ‘more of the same’ by reinforcing the existing configurations (Højer et al. 2018). For instance, a conflict over religious symbols can entrench the prevailing sentiments, be it towards secularism or immigrants (ibid.). Similarly, the new normal may help strengthen the existing inequalities and therefore become the not-so-new normal. For instance, the ‘normalization’ of LGBTQ characters in The New Normal sitcom may have reinforced the stereotyping of sexual minorities (Byrd Jr. 2014). Responses to school shootings in the United States often establish the not-so-new normal – new routines provide psychological comfort but do not help to resolve the problem (Fogel 2018).

The COVID-19 pandemic might follow a similar trajectory and strengthen the existing societal divides (Kurnosov and Varfolomeeva 2020). Many early indicators suggest that the COVID-19 crisis has reinforced hierarchies and inequalities.

Some of the indicators correspond to the consequences of the public health responses to earlier epidemic outbreaks. In 2003, the Canadian city of Toronto quarantined more than 15 thousand people to prevent the spread of the SARS virus. Subsequent surveys indicated that many quarantined residents believed they did not receive sufficient information about their health condition and possible dangers of the virus. Some of those quarantined displayed symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (Hawryluck et al. 2004). The early COVID-19 pandemic saw a similarly forceful use of quarantines that resulted in feelings of extreme isolation and in blurring the lines between care and control (Varfolomeeva 2020). In some jurisdictions (such as Mainland China, Singapore and Russia before April 2020) all people testing positive for COVID-19 were hospitalized, while in others (including Australia, New Zealand, and Mongolia) all foreign arrivals were placed in mandatory institutional isolation. For the COVID-19 patients, the sense of isolation was exacerbated by the lack of information about the disease and its treatment (Kurnosov and Varfolomeeva 2020). Information shortages in health institutions resembled a conscious tactic to obscure the limited knowledge of the virus and maintain a doctor-patient hierarchy.

Some official responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were termed ‘hygiene theatre’ (Thompson 2020) and also bear the hallmarks of the not-so-new normal. ‘Hygiene theatre’ denotes actions that are visible to the public but have little to do with actual disease control, such as spraying subway stations and streets with disinfectants, conducting temperature checks and introducing glove mandates. These measures may establish psychological comfort as they are easily noticeable. However, they waste scarce resources and obscure vital public health messages by distracting the citizens from more efficient ways to combat the virus (Thompson 2020, 2021). Such measures are deemed ineffective by public health experts, yet continue to be maintained. Even more problematic are situations when the authorities target minority groups to promote public health measures, such as by restricting immigration (Davies 2021). For example, the United States government (under both Trump and Biden administrations) has relied on epidemic control as the basis for denying asylum-seekers entry into the country. At the same time, the United States did not restrict any other type of immigration (American Immigration Council 2021). Enforcing measures that are driven by public opinion strengthens the existing societal inequalities.

The experiences of lockdowns and related pandemic management measures depend on one’s health, age, and socioeconomic status. People with chronic disease encountered a reduced access to healthcare for non-COVID-19 conditions during the pandemic (Bambra et al. 2020, Mansfield et al. 2021). The switch to online education was found to more likely put at a disadvantage underprivileged students who experienced a larger decline in learning in comparison to their peers (Di Pietro et al. 2020). Children and adolescents with lower economic status or with a migration background and limited living space have experienced significant challenges to their mental health during lockdowns (Ravens-Sieberer et al. 2021). In addition, lockdown restrictions increased the risk of gender-based violence due to the mental effects of isolation and barriers to victim support (Acosta 2020, Bambra et al. 2020).

Inequalities intensified during the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. At the beginning of November 2021, over half of the world population had received at least one vaccination dose (Ritchie et al. 2021). However, 82 percent of vaccines have been distributed to high- and upper-middle-income countries (Furlong and Deutsch 2021). Only 4 percent of the population in low-income countries received a vaccination by that time (Ritchie et al. 2021). Vaccines themselves are valued unequally, in a way that reflects the disparities between countries. Richer countries have donated vaccines they deemed as less safe to poorer countries (Zinets 2021). The same vaccine, like the Oxford-AstraZeneca, was officially recognised in some European Union countries only if was produced in Europe rather than in the AstraZeneca factory in India (Euractiv 2021).

Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic had uneven effects that depended on ethnicity, wealth and gender, for example, the stigmatization of ethnic minorities (Li and Nicholson 2021), the growth in income disparities (Palomino, Rodríguez, and Sebastian 2020), and an exacerbation of gender inequality (Fisher and Ryan 2021). These, too, produced a state of not-so-new normal.

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