Five years ago, the US and much of the world shut down to the rapid spread of COVID-19 and the beginning of the pandemic. At the time, I and pretty much everyone else had no idea what to expect in the coming weeks, months, and as it turned out, years.
I remember reading about the start of COVID in China, and then Italy. I was of course concerned and worried, but naively thought that maybe it would pass us over. Boy was I wrong.
I remember the NBA shutting down and the one player poking fun at it only to be very quickly diagnosed with COVID-19. I don’t really follow the NBA all that closely, but that was the “oh shit” moment for me. I know how big the NBA is, and for them to essentially turn away ticket sales, meant that it was serious enough for me to pay attention to. And how fucked up is it that a sports league shutting down is what triggered it for me. It should have been from reading the news or something along those lines.
Then it was the slow trickle of news from the first outbreaks in the US. The rise of cases in New York City and seeing all the hell it brought with it. The realization that my wife and I took a long weekend trip to New York City at the end of February 2020 getting out just before it hit...
I again naively thought that maybe we’d only be locked down for a month or two. But then the news kept getting worse. More areas affected, death tolls climbing, politicians sniping back and forth about what’s the best way to go about handling it. One side acknowledging the dangers, the other side pushing batshit crazy treatments for it and saying it will just go away.
As it turns out, five years later, we’re still dealing with the aftermath of it.
Looking back at what I went through personally, I can’t help but feel incredibly lucky and fortunate to have made it through as unscathed as I did. Others weren’t as fortunate and my heart goes out to them.
The biggest advantage my wife and I had when this all started was that we both work tech jobs. My wife had been working from home for almost 3 years, and it was easy for me to shift to working remotely as I’ve worked from home periodically and I’m a developer. Realistically all I really need to work is a computer and a high speed internet connection, both of which I have. It’s pretty easy to social distance when you don’t have to leave your house to work.
I think of the doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers who put themselves in harms way to help the sick, and everything they were having to deal with. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account everyone furloughed unsure where their next paycheck was going to come from, or the grocery store workers, and everyone else who didn’t have the ability to work from home, but still had to go into work.
My wife and I could pretty much hunker down at home and do our own thing. We’d sport masks once a week to do our grocery shopping. We’d try to order takeout once a week to support our local restaurants which were no doubt struggling, and we’d wait for things to get better.
I’m still so mad though.
I’m still incredibly angry at those who went through the pandemic and refused to wear a mask or do the bare minimum to help keep others safe. I’m by no means going to come out and say that lockdown was fun, or wearing a mask was fun, or that social distancing was all that great. But it wasn’t normal times, and masks and social distancing are such small things to do to potentially save someone’s life. My wife and I are fortunate to not have medical conditions making us particularly vulnerable, but many others do. The fact that people were so selfish as to be unwilling to think of others for the short period they were in stores just makes me so angry.
I still have a hard time looking at the few people I know who bitched and moaned about it or refused to wear one the same way.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you think of all the people who refused to get the vaccine or actively campaigned against the vaccines.
Looking Back and Ahead
The one thing we should have learned from all of this is that our health care system here in America is incredibly uneven, and we need to do better. For those of us with means, we tend to be okay. But the poor and less fortunate are at such an extreme disadvantage. I would’ve hoped we would have learned something from it, but the last 5 years have made it abundantly clear that we have not.
What we need is to overhaul our health care system and make it easier for those with less means to be able to access the care they need. Go fund me is not how healthcare should work.
We also need federal, state, and local governments to put in place programs to handle the next pandemic. Because make no mistake, there will be another pandemic at some point whether we like it or not. Sadly at the federal level, and in many state houses, I don’t see that happening.