Oh, definitely. Not (just) for the common cold, but for all the other places where Covid shook us from the local maximum. The obvious are WFH, ecommerce, delive

Oh, definitely. Not (just) for the common cold, but for all the other places where Covid shook us from the local maximum. The obvious are WFH, ecommerce, deliveries, courier businesses, normalizing masks in the western hemisphere. More subtle is the general shaking and closing of unprofitable businesses and making room for new ones. Yet more subtle is rubbing everybody's nose in the fact that long term risks and black swans are something that should be paid attention to. But by far, the most useful thing we got of this pandemic is once again moving medicine up in the priority list. Lately it had gotten stuck at "hiv is not curable, let's have another cancer fundraising". And one year later we're at "vaccine for cancer, pill for common cold", plus god knows how many other things. And hopefully, just hopefully, it's shown enough people that FDA-style organizations are a huge brake for serious progress. Challenge trials -> vaccinations started 6 months earlier -> probably 0.1% deaths overall (yes, it's 6 months in an exponential).