Five Years
It has been five years since my last day of "normal".
Friday the 13th, 2020, I took my kids to school. I went to the grocery store, in person, without a mask on my face. I bought some fresh produce and some bulk dry goods. I remember joking with the cashier about how they still had toilet paper in stock. (By some quirk of fate, they had accidentally wound up with an overstock of toilet paper just before everyone started buying it all up, so they were selling it by the roll.)
A few weeks earlier, I had done my own stocking up on things like Clorox wipes, bleach, soap, OTC meds, and yes, one package of toilet paper, because I was pretty sure I could see what was coming. If I was wrong and it turned into a nothingburger, well, I figured we would doubtless use it all anyways with how sick we had been for the past 9 months. When I had made that shopping run, there was plenty of everything on the shelves. A week later, all the toilet paper was gone.
I remember joking with friends at school pickup that COVID would probably be the next disease to rip through my household. After all - we had already had strep, pneumonia, pinkeye, HMPV, and countless miscellaneous "bugs". It seemed nearly inevitable. But I planned to keep my youngest kid, the one we had just found out was probably immunocompromised, home from school the next week.
Little did I know that no one would be going back to school the next week.
We spent the first two weeks of the stay-at-home order sick. I don't know if it was COVID or not. It could have been. I know it was already circulating in the community by then. I don't think it's what we had - we never lost our sense of smell or taste, and whatever we had did not seem as bad as people's accounts of first-wave COVID infections sounded. But we had no tests then, so we'll never know.
After that, though, we got healthy. For the first time in nine LONG months, everyone in the house was healthy. It was amazing. But seeing things like the refrigerator trucks in New York, I also felt horribly guilty. I remember standing in my garage and crying while listening to the ambulances heading to our nearby hospital.
I also remember beautiful expressions of community. Friends I hadn't talked to in years came together on Zoom calls. A friend from high school put together video art classes for kids. A friend from elementary school sent my kids packets of tomato seeds to grow. My kid's teacher came to our house to do a porch visit to mark the end of kindergarten. We started sending letters to distant relatives. We had weekly family Zooms. My youngest kid discovered The Beatles thanks to Radio Milwaukee's "School of Rock". I made amazing new friends at virtual community gatherings.
I wish we could have kept all of that.
It has been five years now. The pandemic is not yet over, though the government response and social solidarity are. In those early days, someone asked an immunologist named Dr. Anthony Leonardi how long he thought the pandemic would last. His answer was 5-10 years, and that it would probably end when we invented some kind of prophylactic, nano-targeted antibodies. At the time I was horrified at the prospect of it lasting that long. In retrospect, though, I am grateful that I grappled with those feelings so early. Because it has been five years. And the pandemic isn't over.
We actually might be close to inventing those nano-targeted antibodies now. (Technically it's a peptide.) But looking at where we are now, our problem is not a technical one - it's a social one. Even if, in the best of all worlds, that peptide is 100% safe and 100% effective, how would you convince people to take it? How would you convince governments to order it? How would you convince insurance to cover it? And what do you do about all the other diseases we've started to let run rampant in the meantime?
I don't have any answers.
But I do know that we can build beautiful things in the face of adversity. And as we stare down a whole lot more adversity yet to come, let's join together and build more beautiful things to fight it.