It took nearly three years for airline travel numbers to get back to what they were before 9/11. Though these two events are obviously very different, it does suggest that it will be a very long slow road. I would think the impact of the pandemic on the world economy will be much harsher, by a large factor, than 9/11. I know that the travel industry was already bracing for the end of the baby boomer generation in the next 20 years or so — as the last generation in the US with guaranteed pensions, many predictions were that the bottom would fall out of retiree travel, which is a huge part of the US traveling public.
A friend of mine has joked that the coronavirus was Mother Nature‘s way of sending us to our room because of our bad behavior, and it will be interesting to see if we get the message.
My initial reaction was that in terms of camino impact, the “return to normalcy” would likely see a spreading of peregrinos across some of the less traveled caminos, where social distancing comes from the nature of the camino itself. But those are also the caminos with a lot less infrastructure, so maybe their future is more precarious.
Buen camino, Laurie