A vaccine won't give us normal life e.g. 60k full football stadiums, no mask wearing on public transport and live music gigs/festivals which people all want to enjoy again eventually the day after the first jab though.
Hopefully 2021 won't be as grim as this year but the first half of it is still going to be under restrictions, saw interview with someone from Public Health England who said compulsory face masking would still be needed up to June/July which looks realistic. That would rule out the early summer festivals unless they just went to one day but already taken a hit financially.
Of course these now as seen as life luxuries but just thinking of numbers in normal times who attend football matches over one weekend and the number must be close to a million and you have 100k + attendances at likes of Reading and Leeds, Download and Glasto and there are another hundred smaller festivals.
That's what I'd class as a normal year. I see it as second half of 2021 to get the social scene properly up and running and then 2022 as "normal" providing everything goes to plan with the vaccine trials continuing.
A vaccine, even if a really good one eventuates, won't return everywhere instantly back to pre-covid conditions but it will be a massive step in the right direction. We may need multiple vaccines, mononuclear antibody treatments and anti-virals to reduce it to endemic flu like status and that won't be overnight even if we can get enough people to take it.
And for context I was replying to the following post that was working on the assumption that there would be no vaccine, rather than suggesting it was a magic bullet that would fix everything by January.
With no vaccine, at some point the focus will have to be on the vulnerable, they (includes me!) will have to be isolated completely