> Here is my prediction: hopefully most places will hang onto whatever level of reopening they reached this summer without backtracking. I do think this is the last round of widespread hysteria this thing has in it (based on the relative drop in hysteria levels between last year and this year),
Hopefully you're right. You ever read Simon Schama's Citizens, a social history of the French revolution-? He describes "revolutionary madness", and how as late as the 1830s there were people in insane asylums throughout France, who went mad from too much "revolutionary fervor" and had to be locked up, especially after Napoleon destroyed all the great revolutionary hopes by turning France into an empire under an autocrat's rule. Maybe that's what we'll see in country after country : Everyone's back to more or less normal, but there are little enclaves here and there who never go out in public unmasked or unshielded , and without spray bottles of disinfective. that's probably the best case scenario.
If you read books like Schama's Citizens: A chronicle of the French Revolution though, he makes a strong case that the French Revolution was ultimately futile, and vastly hurt the 'little people' most of all, and that ultimately the cure was much much worse than the disease - if there even was a 'disease' worth talking about. The old monarchy's main problem was that progress was too fast, rather than too slow.
Citizens by Simon Schama gives you an in depth view of the entire revolution. Best read after you've mastered the basics of chronology and character though, it's too detailed to be a good intro.
You are extremely ignorant of history.
I recommend the following:
http://www.amazon.com/Citizens-A-Chronicle-French-Revolution/dp/0679726101
http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-Tragedy-Russian-Revolution-1891-1924/dp/014024364X
Oh, and as for Revolutionary France, Simon Schama's Citizens and Christopher Hibbert's The Days of the French Revolution are great places to start. Duff Cooper's biography of Talleyrand is a great book about a fascinating man, written by another fascinating man.