Will a COVID-19 vaccine save us from a permanent new normal?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Will a COVID-19 vaccine save us from a permanent new normal?
Position1 of 2›: A vaccine will allow us to go back to our normal lives
Argument‹2 of 2: We will go back to the office

A vaccine will allow us to return to our usual schedules and routines. Public transport, our morning coffee and office desk will once again become the norm.

The argument

As we hear good news from vaccine trials, many look forward to days when going back to the office is no longer farfetched. As the first wave of cases subsided in many nations over the summer months, offices tentatively reopened. There was an increased awareness of space and a stronger emphasis on health and safety protocols, but viable solutions were found. Working from home is not effective for many workers. There are jobs which require in-person attention and equipment which cannot be accessed outside of labs or a workspace. A vaccine will allow these workers to resume near pre-pandemic levels of normality. Furthermore, technology is struggling to replace in-person communication. Why, when all these resources at our disposal, did we continue to go on business trips? Or have in-person client and group meetings? Only when we were unable to meet and speak in person did we resort to wide spread technological methods of communication.

Premises

[P1]Working from home is ineffective for many jobs that require in-person attention or equipment found only in labs or workspaces. [P2] Technology has struggled to replace in-person communication, which is why business trips and in-person meetings persisted until the pandemic forced remote methods. [C] Therefore, a vaccine will let these workers return to the office and resume near pre-pandemic normality.

Counter-arguments

It is unlikely that we will see the same work environment and office culture we had before the pandemic. Even before 2020, we had begun to see a trend towards more flexible working, with some companies offering staff the option to work from home a couple of days a week. The pandemic has only sped up this transition to telework.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Some work must be done on site and nobody in this question denies it — the position claims that a vaccine will return us to normal life generally, while this premise establishes only that a subset of jobs never left. Those jobs also continued through the pandemic rather than waiting for a vaccine, which weakens the claim rather than supporting it. [Rejecting P2] The rhetorical question has an answer the premise does not consider: business travel and in-person meetings persisted partly through habit, sunk investment in offices, and the absence of any reason to change — which is why a forced experiment was informative. That remote tools were adopted only under compulsion is evidence about inertia, not about their effectiveness. The counter-argument makes the point the argument avoids: flexible working was already growing before 2020, so the relevant comparison is not office against home but the old mix against a new one.