Pandemic Anniversary Reflection

It’s been a year now. A year ago, almost to this day, I was piddling away time rewashing the same glasses, chatting with my manager about the then-newly emerged pandemic. Dust was settling on the stools and chairs around the bar; business had dried up weeks ago. Cable news played on the screens around us, each reporter breathlessly telling the same story. A memory from two weeks ago of a group of customers who were for some reason trying to lick every surface and take selfies while doing so put shivers down my spine. I sprayed more disinfectant on the bar I had been cleaning for the past few hours.

My manager poured himself a beer from one of the taps, busying himself as the conversation had died down.

“What do you think is going to happen?” he asked, cutting through the din of news reporters.

“Things will probably get shut down for a couple of weeks in hard-hit areas,” I ventured.

Since business had slowed to nonexistence, I went home early. There are only so many times you can rewash glasses. My boss told me he’d see me tomorrow, and I bounced out to catch the MAX home. By the time I arrived at Pioneer Square, he had called me to tell me not to come in tomorrow . Then the next day, he called me to tell me we were shutting down indefinitely.

Since then, over 2.5 million people have died from COVID. Countless numbers of other people have been sickened for the rest of their lives and may die of long-term complications from COVID. Asymptomatic people have had chest scans come back showing damage to their lungs and/or other organs. This is a global medical crisis that will echo through people’s bodies for decades to come (if we get it under control). In the coming decades, people will need oxygen, organ transplants, dialysis, and so on long after COVID ravaged their bodies. We don’t know for sure what the effects will be on fetuses.

Chillingly, having been infected by COVID is considered by an increasing number of insurers to be a “pre-existing condition.” Meaning that insurance companies can deny people coverage for things like mental health care or orthopedic surgery because some Karen from 7 years ago didn’t want to wear a mask and got everyone around her at Target sick. And do not doubt for a moment that COVID will be used to disproportionally affect Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and deny them healthcare in the future.

Deaths of despair have also been skyrocketing. The year-long pandemic and resultant quarantines/limitations (depending on where you live, some places have become basically viral reservoirs due to lack of compliance with COVID precautions like social distancing and masks) have worn people down. More and more people are using alcohol, opiates, benzos, etc., to cope with the isolation and dread that comes when a pandemic is just stretching endlessly into the horizon. And sometimes they overdose, and nobody is around to do something about it. More people than expected this year just straight out killed themselves. And I cannot blame people for any of that. This is hard. Especially watching other people go out and party as if they are invincible. People are lonely and bored, and understimulated, and we are all underestimating the impact of experiencing those states for such a prolonged time. And for those who have lost loved ones, the grief can be unbearable.

This past year has been a struggle beyond measure. In addition to the deadliest pandemic in living memory, communities worldwide got us and started pushing back against the toxic threads such as anti-Blackness, racism, transphobia, and so on. From Portland to Myanmar, people have begun to push back, and they’re even has been a lot of successes on that front and even more losses. Not the demands or deserved achievements, so we still need to keep fighting with everything we have. Already, the work is starting to unravel, with Minneapolis actually refunding their police department. We MUST continue to go forward, no matter how stormy it may be.

Let’s also not forget the legions of conspiracy theorists suddenly crawling out of the woodwork like termites in response to the pandemic. It seems that the decades of having right-wing propaganda have emulsified the brains of boomers and boomer-adjacent folks enough where Q-anon and the Anti-maskers could take hold. Typically through media outlets with names like facebookfreedomeagle.maga. In Idaho (which notably does not have any mask mandate), a legion of anti-maskers took their kids to the state capitol to burn medical-grade masks. Texas just said “f*CK it” and reopened entirely. It is frustrating to professionals and laypeople to watch such blatant disregard for human life so consistently. If you’re so pro-life, put the fucking mask on.

But at least now, there seems to be the sun peeping over the horizon, threatening to thaw our seemingly-eternal Winter. After what must have been millions of person-hours of work, there is finally a vaccine. Actually, even better: there are several effective vaccines worldwide. Doctors and nurses in hospitals are becoming more adept at treating people with COVID. Biden is spouting off that everyone will be vaccinated by May (doubt). I hope it’s a beautiful sunrise despite all the ugliness.

Strangely, the pending reopening is anxiety-inducing. Not only is it going to be challenging for many people to re-acclimate after such prolonged isolation (I personally am not looking forward to having to wear pants with buttons more than once or twice a week), but we absolutely cannot go back to normal. We have to forge ahead and build new ways of living in a post-COVID society. “Going back to normal” is basically telling the coronavirus that you’re leaving the back door unlocked.

I doubt that we will see adequate vaccination, in significant part to the conspiracy theorists, as mentioned earlier, who refuse to be vaccinated for what they perceive to be excellent reasons. Meaning we may never see COVID eradicated, and new strains will develop as long as people refuse to take reasonable precautions. Just as we get a yearly flu shot, we may need regular inoculations as new varieties grow.

Of course, COVID may be the first of many new biological disasters we encounter as the world changes. Deforestation and climate change expose long-isolated reservoirs of disease to humans; in America, healthcare is falling apart, anti-intellectualism is reaching new heights and so many more factors that not only make it likely we will see more unknown diseases, but that we will be ill-equipped to handle them. After all, clearly, we did such a great job containing COVID.

Maybe one day, I will go back to slinging drinks and dropping glasses, but with a mask and gallons of hand sanitizer. Maybe one day, kids will sit in classrooms again, but the desks spaced out further than before. Maybe one day you can meet your friends for dinner, inside a restaurant. It won’t be the same as before. The new world is now a maze of clear plastic and acrylic barriers with a hand sanitizer pump every few dozen yards. Put a (gloved) hand in mine, comrade, and hopefully, by summer, and we can step into a new, more sanitized world.