The COVID virus has been used as an excuse to re-order society and permanently concentrate power in the hands of a small elite.  You don't have to wade through the 280 pages of The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret of the World Economic Forum to appreciate how eagerly COVID and its sinister possibilities have been embraced by the upper reaches of our power structure.

I recently received a telling email from the current president of the Harvard Law School Association, a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell, for at least 75 years one of the most influential corporate law firms on Wall Street.  The first paragraph of his email — introducing the new president of the association — is a toss-off illustrating the pervasiveness of this orientation toward permanent change.

The outgoing Harvard law School Association president begins:

I last wrote to you in the fall of 2020, about six months into the global COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, and unexpectedly, we can now say that we are almost two years into this uniquely challenging worldwide crisis. The pandemic and its effects on the social fabric have meant many things to people around the world. For most of us, whatever our experience, it has transformed our lives — the way we work, live, and interact with others. I believe it remains to be seen how many of those changes will be permanent, but to me it does not seem an overstatement to say that this shock, particularly because of its long duration, has forever changed the course of many aspects of the lives of people around the world, albeit in ways that are not yet clear to any of us.

Even though it may be spitting in the wind, I was moved to respond.  I suspect that many readers would share the reaction and thoughts that I conveyed to him: 

The last two sentences of the first paragraph in your email are both unsupportable and deeply troubling. They imply a mindset that millions of normal people in America, Europe and around the world suspect pervades our elites: a desire, as opposed to a mere prediction, that at least some of the always controversial, and increasingly justifiably resented, governmental measures allegedly adopted to control the COVID virus become permanent; and more troubling still, a hope that the principle underlying those measures — that government may suspend cherished personal freedoms and constitutional rights by the simple mechanism of declaring an emergency — may become generalized, to be invoked in the future for other unnamed purposes.

No, the pandemic has not "transformed" our lives (see the second to last sentence, your first paragraph). "Transform" is a transitive verb that implies permanency. There is nothing about this pandemic, certainly nothing about the governmental measures taken allegedly to control it, that need to be permanent. Masks, lockdowns, human isolation and mandatory "vaccination," including severe discrimination against the "unvaccinated," can and should all be dispensed with.  As with the 1918/19 worldwide flu, which killed a vastly greater percentage of our nation and the world's population than this one, there is no reason completely normal life cannot return once the pandemic no longer presents a crisis — as already now appears to be the case. When someone in your position speaks of "transformation" of, as opposed to a massive and temporary interruption of, normal human life and freedom, the reasonable suspicion arises that that person is expressing desire rather than necessity.

And no again, it does not "remain to be seen how many of the changes will be permanent," even though to you "the pandemic "has FOREVER (my emphasis) changed the course of many aspects of the lives of people around the world." Indeed, the governmental measures, not the pandemic itself, "has *** changed many aspects of people's lives around the world." I have deliberately omitted the word "forever" from your quoted language, a word that, again, seems to me to express a wish rather than an inevitable fact.

Normal people, that is people who do not share your highly privileged position or the position of other members of Western governmental and other key elites, long intensely for a complete return of normal human life; and they see no reason why anyone should question either the desirability of that wish, or the possibility that it might soon be fulfilled.

Among other things, they long for a world in which the life-affirming pleasure of direct human interaction is not diminished by countenance obscuring face masks; in which children are not forced to suffer serious detriment in their social and educational development by interacting only with friends and teachers whose faces they cannot see; and in which they are not sent the constant message by adults' monomaniacal focus on possible infection that direct human contact is dangerous and therefore that isolation — which we know to be destructive of the human psyche — is preferable to personal interaction. This is but a partial list of the many destructive aspects of "the measures," not of the pandemic itself, that ordinary people in their millions wish to be permanently and completely done with.

None of what has been going on for the last two years needs to be a "transformation" of human life or to become permanent. 

Unless persons such as you see some other, unarticulated, utility in that permanency.

I am not holding my breath waiting for a response.