Skeezyks is absolutely right folks. There's an old saying: "The more things change the more they stay the same." On 9/11 a lot of people were predicting drastic changes for this country and the way we lived. Virtually none of what people imagined would happen actually happened. Sorry Mountaindewed, your brother-in-law is wrong. The Spanish Flu was deadly. If life before and after it had been markedly different like people think it will be after the Corona virus, we would have read about it in school.

The human race collectively has an incredibly short memory. Five years from now we'll all be telling each other "hey, do you remember when...". We're creatures of habit and collectively those habits are very hard to break. For some time after AIDS became known there were a number of people who still thought of it as a disease that only affected the LGBT community and wouldn't take the proper precautions.

Will there be some changes? Definitely. Will they affect our daily lives? Maybe a few but it will mostly be minor. Covid-19 will largely be something your grandchildren come across on the internet.

By the way, the buffets in the 80s and 90s didn't close for health reasons. If things had been that bad they never would have been allowed to open in the first place. Americans simply stopped going to them.