Wednesday was the fourth anniversary of Presidential Proclamation #9994, declaring COVID to be a national emergency. "A moment that changed the world," is the way one story put it.
Still, emotionally, March 11 didn't touch the surprise in mid-February, having lunch in an utterly deserted Chinatown restaurant in New York City, or March 13, seeing the shelves at Target stripped of bread, or March 16, the day before Gov. Pritzker closed the restaurants in the state. Sitting alone in an empty Kamehachi in downtown Northbrook, watching the sushi chef work, thinking, with true dread, "I'm killing myself for a negi hamachi roll."
Other moments stand out. Wiping our groceries off with disinfectant. Putting on a mask for the first time before going into a store. "I feel like we're going to rob the place," I said to my son. Walking the dog at night, passing knots of neighbors, gathered in folding chairs in their driveway, having a party of sorts, social distancing in the darkness.
Now COVID is gone, mostly, but not forgotten. Not by me anyway. Others, not so much.
"I still can't believe that happened," I sometimes say to my wife, perhaps an indication that it is still happening — almost the dazed remark of a survivor hauled into the lifeboat and wrapped in a wool blanket. I finally came down with COVID last July, and sometimes wonder if it isn't lingering in some ineffable way.
Have you noticed how little we think about COVID now? There is no memorial or even talk of a memorial. They're building a monument to fallen journalists in Washington, D.C., while the 1.1 million Americans dead of COVID, and counting, are forgotten, not that we ever considered them much in the first place. I can hardly accept it myself.
"I still can't believe that happened," I sometimes say to my wife, perhaps an indication that it is still happening — almost the dazed remark of a survivor hauled into the lifeboat and wrapped in a wool blanket. I finally came down with COVID last July, and sometimes wonder if it isn't lingering in some ineffable way.
Have you noticed how little we think about COVID now? There is no memorial or even talk of a memorial. They're building a monument to fallen journalists in Washington, D.C., while the 1.1 million Americans dead of COVID, and counting, are forgotten, not that we ever considered them much in the first place. I can hardly accept it myself.
Very little souvenir crap that events invariably produce, if you discount all the little bottles of hand sanitizer that still pop out of junk drawers. The only tangible relic is my vaccine card, which I'm holding onto for future reference.
That's another moment I'll never forget — March 15, 2021. My older son, at home with his girlfriend because their school had shut down ("Maybe you should get out before they blow the bridges," I told him on the phone. "Dad," he reminded me. "We live in New Jersey....") had gotten a hard-to-snag vaccine appointment at a Walgreen's two-and-a-half hours away, in Springfield. All the appointments in blue state, rational Chicago were taken. At the time I felt flattered, that he was looking out for me. Only later did it dawn on me that he wanted somebody to drive them there.
Either way, I assumed that when I got to the Walgreen's in Springfield it would be jammed, like that last scene at the Jakarta airport in "The Year of Living Dangerously," with Mel Gibson waving his passport over his head and pushing through the crowd.
Instead the place was empty. Not even any customers, never mind downstaters queuing up for the vaccine they decided they didn't really need. I walked up the empty aisle toward the pharmacy in the back with a sense of wonder. I was excited to get the shot, and later regarded with mingled scorn and bogglement all those who spurned it. Rejecting this one aspect of a modernity they otherwise embrace, drinking purified tap water, speaking into cell phones and enjoying all the other benefits of technology, while scorning this one just because some talk show host told them to. I'll never understand it.
You put your Covid card in a vise?
ReplyDeleteIt's actually a business card holder that a vise company gave me.
DeleteWhich makes it the coolest business card holder, ever!
DeleteI remember sitting on the stoop of my apartment in west town with my wife and not seeing a single vehicle drive down. Damon in either direction for at least 10 minutes when a police car drove by.
ReplyDeleteThis is when the first stay-at-home order had been issued and I did for 2 weeks. Didn't leave the house not even to go to the grocery store because that didn't make any sense to me. You can leave to go to the grocery store. Why it's not dangerous there? It's like wearing a mask but going out to dinner and taking it off only when you're eating because why it's not dangerous. Then I went back to work. Got covet three different times in the last 4 years. It's definitely lingering and on my chart it says long covid sufferer. I think it this will be remembered more for the debacle that are government engaged in then for the over 1.3 million deaths that occurred
The policies that were put in place might not have saved any lives or very few in the cost was enormous and we're still at odds politically about it with each other as your article indicates just a horrible time and I'm glad it's behind us for most of us because some of us are still going to die of COVID. Even people who got the vaccine. It's a virus like the flu, but the vaccine isn't as effective as the flu vaccine. You get COVID even after you've been vaccinated and some people die. Not as many as before, but I sure hope that there's an effective vaccine that doesn't just reduce the symptoms but prevents them sometime in the near future.
The disease was a drag. The social circumstances surrounding trying to avoid this disease or even more of a drag and the economic impact was beyond a drag. I'm still paying off my loan I took to save my business and will be for the next 27 years.
Like I'll still be alive
"The policies that were put in place might not have saved any lives or very few in the cost was enormous and we're still at odds politically" is a political, not factual, statement.
DeleteThe facts on this matter are still not settled. I read about it a little bit before I wrote my comment and the deaths above. Expected is the primary source that can be referenced to see how many people died prior to the mask mandates and the vaccines and the number that have died since
DeleteIt is unclear whether the government policies helped to mitigate this disaster, which honestly is still ongoing. People still die and if everybody stays in the house people still die from COVID.
That's not a political statement. Nearly to the degree that you're post is today. It's a fact people died and continue to die and if it wasn't for the weekend variants we'd be more able to determine the efficacy of the actions taken by our government. That's the government that was in place when Trump was in as well as with Biden in the government was ineffective in mitigating COVID and cause an economic catastrophe. That's not politics. It's just true
"It is unclear..." to you. That doesn't make it unclear to others. Remember FME, this is not a space where the confused are encouraged to parade their confusion. People dying and continuing to die is not a refutation of any medical practice. People dying in surgery, still, does not refute sterilizing surgical instruments. Perhaps you could consider that at length before commenting further.
Delete"The policies that were put in place might not have saved any lives or very few..."
DeleteIn the words of Wikipedia: Citation Needed.
A reasonable lefty like FME being comfortable writing "The policies that were put in place might not have saved any lives or very few..." is certainly demonstrable evidence that "we're still at odds politically."
DeleteIt's a communicable disease. Not everybody exposed to it got it, by a long shot, but plenty did. At the same time, many who were able to avoid being exposed to it, often because of "the policies put in place," did NOT get it, at least as long as they could continue isolating. That part is not rocket science.
Granted, there's a lot of gray area with regard to all of it and we'll never know just how effective a perfectly-executed mask mandate would have been, for instance, because there was no such thing. At the height of the pre-vaccination surge, you'd see people with masks around their necks, or below their noses.
What's not in question is that, after the vaccines became available, significantly more folks have died from Covid in "red" counties than "blue" counties. That qualifies as a political remark, but only because Fox News and the anti-vax MAGAts chose to make vaccines a political issue.
To say that is questionable whether the policies saved any lives is not exactly political, nor incorrect. There are studies that show that, whilst many vulnerable people may have been saved from being infected due to the mandates, their numbers may have been cancelled out by the increased death toll from non-Covid related causes that emerged in the wake of the lockdown protocols (excess deaths that resulted from the spike in drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, suicides, auto fatalities, etc, to say nothing of other social costs like the massive regress in education). The methods of calculation that arrived at these numbers might be disputable, but to say that they are not worth considering merely proves that confused minds do indeed parade their confusions in these parts.
DeleteHave I noticed how little we talk about COVID now? Yes and it was exactly what I had assumed would be the case. Not because of some current defect in my fellow Americans (though one certainly seems to exist among many). But because when I was in college I took a fascinating class in the History of Disease. We had a whole unit on the 1918-18 Flu pandemic and a fact that stood out was about how little people discussed the overwhelming numbers of deaths ( mostly of those who were in the prime of life) or the whole experience of living through that. While scholarly works and as well as popular works had immediately dealt with the effects of a foreign war, the deaths at home were essentially “forgotten” quickly. Crosby’s “ America’s Forgotten Pandemic” does an amazing job of discussing what the publisher calls “ the curious loss of national memory of this cataclysmic event”
ReplyDeleteIsn't that whole reaction summed up in the name "Spanish Flu"? The supected origins of the 1918 epidemic were in the US but the only reports came from Spain.
DeleteFor four years I avoided Covid. Masked, distanced, mostly stayed home. Three weeks ago I went to a funeral. Got what I thought was a bad cold. Sick for 8 days, friends finally dragged me to emergency. Covid AND pneumonia. Six days in the hospital. Home five days now and better. Lesson? Being fully vaccinated does not keep you from getting sick, but it does mitigate the effects
ReplyDeleteThat's not really the lesson. One example does not prove a rule or a trend. The vaccine has helped keep many people from being symptomatic when they got infected.
DeleteI've been vaccinated and got every booster available, and still picked up COVID in January. A much more mild case than you had, but still, I would hate to go through it again. Glad you're feeling better.
DeleteDeni: The Germans have a lovely expression, "Eine Schwalbe macht noch keinen Sommer," that conveys this. "One swallow does not a summer make." (Though I wish they'd have picked a different bird, as "swallow" can scan in English as what you do with food, not the avian genus). Looking into the matter, I see Aristotle says the same thing, regarding spring.
DeleteIn Ken Follett's World without End novel set in 1300s England, the Black Death plays a feature role. Published in 2007, one of the novel's main characters, a freethinking nun, has a long running dispute with conservative monk doctors over the strips of linen covering the nose and mouth and the handwashing that she recommends versus the bleedings and other ineffectual remedies relied upon by Oxford trained physicians. Nobody knew how the disease was transmitted or why some people who took no protective precautions did not get the plague, why some got sick but recovered and why some succumbed despite an otherwise strong physique. The only agreed upon solution was to "leave soon, go far and stay long." Some interesting parallels for a book written years before our "plague."
ReplyDeleteJohn
I just got around to opening the standby package of Mega Charmin toilet paper I scored at Target in 2020. Think we’re past that but I subscribe to being fully vaccinated and being careful in public settings.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate your reflections on COVID. I wonder if we need to have group conscious raising sessions, like we did in the 60s about women's liberation to debrief and learn what we can to be more prepared for a future pandemic. and to recover from what we experienced. Are we experiencing a sort of national PTSD? I was diagnosed with COVID early on but had hardly any symptoms and no after effects but remember feeling just this weird sense of following protocols (medical providers called every day to check on me) but not knowing how thus is going to end and hating but believing in the masks (they always fogged up my glasses)! Petty inconvenience when people were dying. It’s curious to me how much judgment and distrust we carry as a species vs. appreciation and awe for what we did do and learning what we could do better for the future.
ReplyDeleteCOVID things that stand out in my mind: Temporary hospitals, people dying, sanitizing groceries, homemade masks, store shelves empty of toilet paper, paper towels, peroxide, disinfectant. Watching from my living room window many people walking up and down my street who I'd never seen before. And many, many dogs purchased (I'm a dog trainer). Conducting Zoom dog training lessons with my infant granddaughter in my lap. May we keep moving forward.
ReplyDeleteI remember driving my sister home from Florida. We were on the road when Gov. Pritzker announced the shutdown in Illinois. Originally my sister was going to drive me from Champaign to restaurant in Kankakee later in the week to meet a neighbor of mine bring who would me back home to Chicago. That was no longer an option. I stayed with her for a week trying to figure out how to get home.
ReplyDeleteThen my stepson offered to come down to Champaign from Chicago to take me home. It was surreal being on the highway & hardly seeing any cars as we made it to my house.
I was lucky after I got home, I saw that my neighbors had put fresh food and vegetables in my refrigerator. They even left masks for me that were so difficult to get.
I got my first two shots in a local hospital. It was very busy with a room full of people giving shots all constantly busy. I had to drive my wife about 45 minutes away for hers and that hospital was also busy. We have gotten all the rest of the shots at the local CVS and sadly it was never crowded except for the first booster series. We plan to get the next shot next month. We have too many things trying to kill us alread rather than add one more voluntarily.
ReplyDeleteCan it be true, that all this happened just four years ago - 2020?
ReplyDeleteWe were talking last night about how bizarre & awful the whole thing was. Mary
ReplyDelete"In my own memories of the advent of COVID, that day, March 11, doesn't particularly stand out."
ReplyDeleteThat's funny, because March 11 was THE day that I always counted as the real beginning. That was the day that the WHO declared that Covid was a global pandemic. A couple Chicago theaters had announced they were limiting audiences. The NBA announced it was suspending the season. Meanwhile, we went to the sold-out Steppenwolf Theater to see "BUG" in what ended up being the last performance there for a long time. I wasn't wild about the idea, but it had very good reviews!
Weeks later, I remember stepping over the copy of the Sunday Tribune in the doorway with a screaming headline about "Masks recommended," as we were on the way to the grocery store, not wearing masks. Uh, to this day, I think that was the last time for that...
Though we're in the minuscule minority who've maintained a somewhat modified lifestyle until now, this 4th anniversary has essentially coincided with our coming out party. Primarily because, after waiting and waiting for something to change about the current reality, it's quite clear that there's really nothing to be waiting for. The Covid situation is gonna be like this for either a long time, or forever, it seems.
Here's a 3-year old article from ESPN. https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/30546338/visual-line-day-changed-everything-march-11
I remember March 11 as when all the emails and texts came blasting in from the office, telling everyone to work from home.
ReplyDeleteAnother date I distinctly recall: Feb. 26. "When you only have fifteen people, and the fifteen in a couple of days is going to be down close to zero..." Then I knew we would all soon be up shit river.
People still get sick but the death rate declined drastically , folks. It’s not because people started praying harder.
ReplyDeleteAmen!
DeleteAs evidenced here, people are still pretty heated about this topic. As I'm doing taxes at my AARP site I run into people who want to bring it up (angrily, in every case so far). My new stock response is a mild "It was a confusing time. I think everyone was doing the best they could."
ReplyDeleteAngry people are such a drag.
DeleteYes. The anger of the anti-vaxxers and the anti-maskers who politicized and weaponized a deadly pandemic, while the rest of us were just trying to survive. They pissed me off so much that I wished illness and death upon them, not exactly something to be proud of.
DeleteNormally, I wouldn't wish such things on anyone. My excuse was: "But they're Trumpers!" Which made me no better than they were. Old saying: "Never wrestle with a pig. You'll get very dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
For my wife and me, the last day of normalcy was March 9, 2020. We went to an early movie and came outside to a lovely day, more like May than March. Birds chirping, a full moon that evening. Our guy Joe was gonna be the nominee against Orangy Boy. Yes! All was right with the world. At least...with our world.
ReplyDeleteThen, the very next day, rain and fog and thirty degrees colder, and the poop hit the propeller. An eerie quiet. Over the next three days, America shut down. It was the Land of Doctor NO. No parades, no school, no March Madness, no pro sports, no events, no libraries, no Lenten fish fries, no haircuts. No, and more no.
On Friday the 13th, Dolt 45 proclaimed a national emergency. Stay home and hide. Hunker in your bunker, Edith and Archie. Which, except for walks in the parks, we did. For the next eleven weeks. Followed by a summer and fall of greatly diminished activity. Air traffic above our house dropped to one or two incoming flights a day. Hours would go by without a single car passing our corner. The dog walkers vanished. Halloween, and "the holidays"...no, no, no, and no.
As seventy-something geezers, we got priority for the first vaccine in January of '21, with appointments scheduled for mid- February. And then...a week before our appointments, the Plague clocked both of us. I had it worse than she did. She spent three weeks on the couch, and I spent that time in bed, trying to sleep, and to breathe, and running to the bathroom. The worst thing was darkness at 6 PM, and facing almost fourteen hours before the light returned. Those long, cold, miserable nights felt endless.
I fully expected to be hospitalized and to never come home again. Lost 15 lbs. pounds. Ate only Jell-o and soup .Then I spent March trying to learn how to walk and breathe at the same time. Took me about seven weeks, in total, from the first symptoms to feeling well again.
During my several weeks of illness, I was still able to re-read a couple of non-fiction books (by Stephen Ambrose) about the combat infantrymen who fought their way across Europe in the final year of WWII. It was a lot more horrible than most people realize. The books and movies have sanitized most of the blood and the nature of combat deaths.
What does any of that have to do with the Plague, you ask? Well, I read about tough veterans who survived winter cold and incredible misery and even hand-to-hand combat, only to be knocked off in the closing days and weeks of the war by some fanatical teen-aged Hitler Youth sniper who refused to lay down his weapon.
That's what Covid-19 was...and is. It's the sniper who will get you, just when you think you've survived the war. Don't let your guard down, and don't figure on luck saving you. Get those boosters. You can still get very sick...or even die. It's far less likely than it was a couple of years ago, but the possibility still exists.
Occasionally, my wife and I will talk about 2020 and 2021 like two old war vets. Did all that really happen? Did we really live through all of it? Yes, we did. But as those awful times recede further and further in our rear-view mirrors, we forget about them more and more. New crises loom ahead. There's another critical election just down the road. As Americans, we tend to have very short memories. My wife and I keep a bunch of masks in our car, in plain sight. As a reminder. And just in case.
Covid lockdown was pretty scary for my husband and I. Because he was high risk, we were super careful. When the vaccine became available to some in Illinois, first responders and the high risk, we were elated. Then the Trump administration cut the number of doses to Illinois and I got Covid in a medical office and unknowingly brought it home. I tested positive and got the monoclonal antibody infusion in the ER. My husband tested negative but I knew he wasn’t. We spent a weekend that December trying to find a test for him. There were not a lot of places that tested then.
ReplyDeleteHe got the cough, was hospitalized, but when the cough stopped, the hospital made him go home. He ended up in the ER twice which was the only place you could get the monoclonal antibody infusion. He never got that treatment. He and his doctor and I did not want him to come home because we knew that Covid waits while you cure one thing and then moves on. He was home 24 hours before he threw a clot in his lung. He was in the hospital for two days after that before his breathing got so bad that he was intubated. They never asked him or me if we wanted that. They would never intubate now. He lasted a week before they shut off the machines after Covid attacked him everywhere. The hospital allowed me to be there when they turned off the machines. They asked me if I wanted that. He was suffering. Of course I said yes
I blame Trump, myself, the hospital, his doctors for his death. This didn’t have to happen. It has been slight over 3 years now and for most people it is over as if it never happened. It is not over for me and it never will be. I have lost half my life and I struggle every day to go on.
More than a million needlessly died from COVID and are still dying. This is not over. How can this country be so cruel to forget the dead and those who lost people so important to them.
The Covid mess was completely mismanaged. The most vulnerable should have been quarantined and the rest of us should have continued on.
ReplyDeleteI knew it was a farce when McDonalds was declared an essential business, but 1000’s
of other small restaurants and businesses were shuttered.
After two months the data were evident. People most at risk had conditions that doomed them. 99% or more of the general populace could and did survive. Me among them. And I was +60 years old. I contracted and suffered for ten days before vaccines were available. I did not get the vaccine, not because I’m an anti science person. Because I know my body will and did protect me after an infestation. I was subsequently exposed to Covid more than once and had no ill affects.
The vaccine offered is more like an insulin shot to me. It does not prevent you from getting the disease. It mitigates it. If one has to continually receive it, it is a medication not a vaccine. Other vaccines prevent. Polio and small pox for example. No one ever had a recurring case of polio or small pox after the vaccine.Yet multiple jabs of Covid medicine and one still receives the bug. Go figure.
That's because the flu or covid vaccine strains can change year to year, unlike Polio or Measles, etc.
DeleteRe a memorial, there is at least one effort underway. I encourage you to listen to this episode of the wonderful “99 Percent Invisible” podcast to learn about the Marked by Covid project: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/dont-forget-to-remember/
ReplyDeleteThis is what I think of when I hear the rote political question "are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?" Goddam right I am, thanks to Joe Biden doing everything he could to bring us back to "normal" (such as it is) 🤬
ReplyDeleteWell there are anti virile meds docs can prescribe over the phone not, right to your pharmacy, if you tested positive with a home test. That will help. The vaccine at least helps some.
ReplyDeleteAnd impt to get the boosters too.
ReplyDeleteBefore the vaccines arrived, my cousin spent 13 days in the hospital with Covid. When discharged the nurses told him they never thought he would leave alive. I was fortunate to get my first two shots at the VA. Two days after receiving the first booster, I attended a superspreader family gathering. 9 of 18 tested positive. It took a week longer than promised for the testing site to give me the news, and that was the worst part for me. I would never have known I was positive if not for the others getting sick. I'll take every shot they recommend and any other precautions should an ugly strain arise to kick our asses again.
ReplyDeleteAre we better off now than we were 4 years ago! Four years ago we could find toilet paper and we were stacking bodies in refrigerator trucks.
ReplyDeleteBring out a vaccine for anything and I will get in line!
Are we better off now than we were 4 years ago? Damn betcha! Joe is at the wheel. That's more than enough for me. Four years ago, Orange Julius was telling us there was no real Covid problem. A month after that, he was telling us to shoot up bleach.
DeleteHell, I'm a lot more worried about what could be happening four years down the road...assuming I'm still breathing at 80. As Casey Stengel famously said "A lot of people my age are dead at the present time, and you can look it up."
Wow, 42 comments. I don’t read this blog every day, but it seems to me that this topic really resonated with a lot of us. Imagine that, anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers. The comment from the person whose husband died is truly heartbreaking.
ReplyDelete