The Ollie Ollie Oxen Will Never Be Free: Learning to Live with COVID-19

Nobody is quite sure where we got the curious phrase “ollie, ollie oxen free” — which children have used for centuries to indicate that the game of hide-and-seek is over and it is now safe to come out. It might be a corruption of some German phrase like alle, alle auch sind frei which means something like, “everyone is also free.” Or maybe it just goes back to somebody who had an ox named Ollie.

For the last two months, however, much of the world has been waiting for someone to shout “ollie, ollie oxen free” so we can come out from our homes and pick up where we left off. I like to imagine going right back to work and picking up conversations in mid-sentence. Everything will go back to the way it was before, and the two-month quarantine will be a memory that fades with time until we wonder whether or not it really happened.

It’s not going to happen.

This is not something that we can wait out. No amount of hiding is going to make it go away. The World Health Organization estimates that it will take five years just to get the virus under control — to make it one of a number of dangerous infections that crop up occasionally but do not pose an existential threat to entire populations. Educational organizations are now saying that strict social distancing measures will have to…