I don't see how many restaurants, hotels, and tourist attractions continue to operate, even after all restrictions are off. Their margins are often slim, and even slight changes in the distancing that people expect are going to but some below sea level. In a long-view sense, this is unrelated to the current crisis, which merely exposes a level of risk that was always there but ignored. One can picture it as analogous to building a house on a floodplain, in a hurricane area, or where storm tides periodically come. How we have lived is fine for most years, but seasons of greater wind or higher water are not that unusual.
Viruses come, usually from China, and will continue to come. In an interconnected world they can come quickly, in a matter of months, as opposed to the years it took for the Black Death. (Blame the Mongols not the Chinese for that one, BTW, at least in the 14th C version.) Some will be lesser and some greater, but the way a large percentage of us have been living - including elevators and restaurants - is too risky for safety. Some but not all of us will make life adjustments that change the arithmetic for may businesses.
I had predicted before that foreign travel might gradually decline because of Virtual Reality, especially as VR can be adjusted to provide different eras, and augmentations such as food, sounds, and even smells can be provided as well. This will hasten that.
An odd analogy. In the centuries before the first Crusades, the Christians in Constantinople couldn't understand why so many Western Christians wanted to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land. After all, they had the Crown of thorns and the True Cross, as well as many other relics right there in the city! Why bother to go out to Jerusalem and walk around in a place where even the buildings were no longer the same. What's holy about dirt? So in our era, why go to Paris when it is no longer Paris? VR Paris 1975 is much cheaper, and reusable all year.
We who have been raised on going to actual places and relishing the quiddity of such things will want "the real thing," but A) it actually isn't the real thing, B) the imitations will get better, and C) our successors will be more comfortable with derivative versions. Most people prefer their sporting events and concerts on a screen at this point. That will be increasingly true for friends as well. We had a Zoom Room with all five sons this afternoon. That has never happened for Mother's Day before, nothing like it. As we can do this for all holidays plus some times when we just feel like it, for a helluva lot cheaper for the sons over 1000 miles away, we will come to prefer our new world, with actual presence increasingly viewed as a lot of work for not much more payback. And that's us, in our 60's who grew up on live-space. Our granddaughters will be even less tied to it.
Some things will just be distant, not so much changed by C19 and revealed by it.
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I will plug Peter Ziehan again. He was talking four or five years ago about the unwinding of the zombie Cold War global system. Trump had already opened the throttle on it. Wuhan Flu will put it in overdrive.
I wonder if a decline in the public hospitality industry would mean more private servants.
The willingness to spend most of one's time at home is probably largely a function of the size & comfortableness of that home. A small 15th floor apartment in a big city is much less desirable from that standpoint than a reasonably large house with a nice yard in a walkable neighborhood.
I believe one of the reasons why cafe culture became such a big think in Paris is that most people had homes they really didn't want to spend a lot of time in.
@ David Foster - yes, I think that is so. But look at what is happening now. The city dwellers are the ones insisting we stay cautious, while the exurban and rural citizens, who likely feel less closed in, are the ones pushing hardest to open up. I think it is a secondary effect of what you are describing. Out in the open spaces, people look around and say "I can go on as normal. What on earth are we shuttering up the stores for?" while the city dwellers are looking at the environment outside their homes and saying "These people are still too close and too many of them are unmasked, crowding, seemingly uncaring. I can't do anything I usually do, because my eyes tell me it's too dangerous."
AVI...I think one of the biggest social/political splits in the country is that between The City Mouse and The Country Mouse. Has been the case for a long time, but the split is getting sharper.
At the moment--I suspect that the city dwellers who are most focused on 'staying cautious' are those with continuing incomes and nice living conditions...the others, maybe not so much. Haven't seen any actual data on this, though.
I think that in general, the split between "Open" and "Stay Closed" has been made way too binary. There is in reality a big continuum in between--avoiding attendance at indoor movie theaters, or even banning such, is a very different proposition from avoiding or banning drive-in movies. State & local officials of the Respect-Mah-Authoriteh flavor have pushed things to a level which gets a lot of people pretty angry, and understandably so.
Jerusalem even today is very much worth visiting, if we get to the place where it is again possible to do so safely.
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