Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

This was late July 2020, so the furor over masking had already begun, dividing the nation along the usual polarizing political lines, with Trump egging on his supporters about Freedom! and ivermectin.

I was backpacking in a very remote wilderness area, about 9 miles from the trailhead. A solo woman backpacker was coming up the trail toward me wearing a bandana for a mask. There was plenty of room to step off the trail, so I stepped aside about 20 feet to let her pass. Seeing me, she stopped and asked me to put on a mask. I said sorry, but I didn't have one with me. She then stood about 100 feet from me and spent the next five minutes vehemently berating me as an irresponsible lout and public menace. Once she slowed enough that I could respond, I asked her if she'd feel more comfortable if I moved even further off the trail so she could pass. Very reluctantly, she assented to this solution. So I did. And she walked by and was gone.

Afterwards I realized I was wearing a bandana on my head during all this, but I didn't think of it because it wasn't "a mask". It was also visible to her, but she evidently didn't realize it, either. It was a strange time.

I've told this story before. Exactly four years ago I left Chapel Hill after a Destroyer concert for NYC to meet a guy I was seeing. I kept hearing that line by Treebeard: "It's likely we march to our doom." The Raleigh-LaGuardia flight was the emptiest I've ever seen; both airports were deserted. In NYC cabbies and Uber drivers had already put up plastic sheets b/w them and us. I met a friend for cocktails who said that two weeks earlier he'd been so sick he couldn't even think; he thought it was COVID. Cleaning crews were scrubbing subways. Arriving on a Thursday, I was already in a panic on Friday -- I thought Cuomo would shut the airports down, requiring me to drive down, as if it were 9-11 again. I was supposed to stay through Monday but changed my flight for Saturday morning (I rode those airline credits well into 2022).

Quick memories/thoughts:

* In February 2020, I kept refreshing a Guardian Covid Q&A webpage that included the question "Should we be worried?" and the answer "No." Sometime in early March that question disappeared and I finally accepted we were fucked.

* For a while, if I left the house, I would shampoo when I got home, in case I caught Covid off my own hair.

* Our daughter was born in September 2019 and I quit my job in December 2019, so I could spend six months as a stay-at-home parent. It turned out to be two years! Finding a new job was fucking impossible, but the extra time with my daughter was priceless so it was certainly worth it.

* It was incredibly sunny in the UK in 2020 and I spent a lot time reading books outside with a beer while my daughter slept inside, and that was pretty good really.

* I feel like I hallucinated watching a whole season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

* We started seeing my parents inside again (we saw them quite a lot outside) around June 2021 once we'd all been double vaccinated. And then my dad died in December 2021 (not of Covid). So because of covid, I missed way too much grandad-dad-grandaughter time, which fucking sucked.

there were some people a couple streets over from me doing the evening pot-banging thing, which somehow was supposed to show support for medical staff and essential personnel. They kept at it for a couple months, and then there was just this one young girl, about 10 or so, and she kept at it for a LONG time, still out there in the evening, banging on a saucepan. I'm sure the neighbors were glad when she finally retired her slotted spoon

My overarching memory is being very, very sacred and convincing myself if I got it I was going to be on a ventilator. I was more determined than anyone I knew not to put myself in a situation where I might catch it.

I could see which way the wind was blowing way before anyone else I knew. Several friends and my partner thought I had lost my mind as I locked myself down 2 weeks before the country was told to. I was all stocked up on all required supplies long before any panic buying had begun. I was a very early adopter of washing my shopping and pivoting to having everything delivered.

I can laugh about some of my behaviour now but even though a whole load of positives eventually came out of it - eg I got very fit, my partner proposed to me and I had a wildly creative period post summer 2020, I do think that initial level of heightened anxiety slightly changed me forever.

Yes, that May-June period was the most intensest creative period of my life.

one nice & lasting memory is my friend in Australia and I started a pandemic bookclub in Dec 2020 for just the two of us so that we could have something to talk about aside from the pandemic & trump (lol)

it’s still going -mostly an excuse to chat once a week but it really did keep us both sane through the worst periods

When Big Ears 2020 was cancelled I was in line at at a Starbucks for my afternoon coffee and I decided to tell my boss that won’t be coming in the next Monday. He was quite understanding— then Maryland shut everything down that week, including the commuter bus I took to work.

Also, I continued to see my girlfriend every weekend throughout and we stared a little pod. We wed last year.

Yes, that May-June period was the most intensest creative period of my life.

Just realizing now that I wrote two books during the pandemic.

Those kind of things were important, weren't they? A couple of friends and I used to listen to Glen Johnson's Arcane Delights radio show *at the same time* and message each other and drink wine, just to communicate with people that meant loads to us.

"my wife died in February 2020 so after her memorial at the end of the month I basically had to deal with that completely isolated for 5 months, I knew nobody where I lived at the time."

I'm so sorry, poo! its just such a terrible thing for anyone to go through. oof. When my mother died during covid a grand total of four extended family members came to her funeral and i couldn't see their faces or hug them and they left as soon as it was over. I feel like I never really grieved back then. It was all just so depressing and terrible and I never thought my father would make it through those days. The very beginning of covid was even more depressing and scary if that's possible but I won't go into that here.

But again, my apologies and sympathies to you and your family. A hug from across the Atlantic.

My condolences, poo.

absolutely terrible times. <3

I remember some moments of sweetness as well: I was on that crummy NextDoor site, and there were neighbors asking if any seniors or invalids in the area needed any help with groceries, picking up prescriptions, pet walking, yard work, etc.

Before the awful culture war began over vaxxing & masking (almost immediately), there was a really cool period of community engagement that was very touching and sincere

i'll tell you what, in retrospect, really did help me. after that part where everything was closed - i can't even remember how long that lasted - i kept my store open full-time throughout the whole thing and, while i am no one's idea of an essential worker, giving people a place to go during that time - just some time away from the house or apartment or their horrible family or whoever - gave me something to focus on and really did make me appreciate that i had somewhere else to go myself and wasn't trapped in some studio apartment somewhere because those are the people i felt really bad for. anyway, my store never got really full and people could browse and take their mind off of things before they had to go home or run the terrifying gauntlet of the supermarket. i felt good about that and it did distract me from my own screaming brain a bit.

you are a treasure, scott! i’m sure folks appreciated it a lot, i know i would

(it helped that i lived somewhere with a small population and low covid numbers for the most part. and we were as safe as we could be especially when my dad was in the store too after moving in with us toward the end when people were still masked but also getting shots and all that. maria was the only person in our house to get pretty bad flu-like covid and she isolated in a bedroom and it sucked really bad for her but the rest of us luckily stayed healthy.)

I remember after a couple months of isolation I couldn't sleep in my bed normally anymore, I had to lie perpendicularly on it sitting up or I couldn't fall asleep. A laugh for Austinites: I would go out walking in the middle in the night and sprawl out on the greens at the Hancock Golf Course and pass out. Sometimes drunk but usually just exhausted. Also vividly remember going to the ER for a kidney stone and being absolutely delighted the entire time by how normal it was in there, and how fun it was to see and talk to different people.

wonderful that you enjoyed your kidney stone experience, that must be a first

i was thinking the same thing D:

lol f. hazel, that is some great imagery

I found myself getting nostalgic for that couple of months after lockdown had fully lifted and people were just starting to feel comfortable with mingling again. It was a rare period when the world felt less cynical than it had before or would after. That year, 2022, just felt like the year when everyone was excited just to be alive and to be able to go out and see each other and enjoy life

(When I say EVERYONE, obviously I don't mean everyone. One of my best friends works as an infections control nurse and was battling with demons, personal and vocational, every day and night. It was a traumatic time for people like her, and obviously everyone who had been affected by covid through losing loved ones or having their own health affected; so I don't mean to sound insensitive about the gravity of it)

We figured when Tom Hanks got it we were going to be shutting down work within 48 hours. We lost a fella who worked in the gear room very early in april. He had many preexisting conditions that made his passing seem inevitable, in retrospect, but he was a great guy and one of those people whose career i consider a happy “plausible outcome,” so to have him die from the disease as he was cheerfully winding down his working life was doubly sad. I got good at being in and out of market in 10 minutes or less and bathing as soon as i got home. I remember telling my now-wife that i wasnt worried about food shortages for humans but i was worried about food shortages for the cat.

I found myself getting nostalgic for that couple of months after lockdown had fully lifted and people were just starting to feel comfortable with mingling again. It was a rare period when the world felt less cynical than it had before or would after.

I know you referred to a year later, but for me it was April-early-July '21, what I call the Post-Vax Honeymoon before Delta came along: the first time friends and I actually met in restaurants. I also had my first sex since March '20. I didn't retreat again when Delta hit, just pulled back for a bit, but it was the last time I thought, "Oh, COVID's GONE, man!"

Memories of actual covid times

- livestreaming five hour DJ sets from my bedroom to my friends

- getting a positive test five minutes before I was meant to jump in the car (with a boot full of Christmas snacks) to see my family. Spent the week eating cocktail sausages in bed and bingewatching movies. I was so sad but also looking back, it was kind of a good time!

- summer days spent in this one field hanging out with friends because the pubs weren't open. We never go there any more. It was our covid field. I miss it

- losing my shit at my housemate for bringing a friend back to the house during a lockdown. I feel bad about it now, but at the time I was livid. I think I was going round the twist

- my partner at the time lost her job in events and got a temp job as a covid checker at the local college. I remember us getting up early mornings in the middle of winter so I could lift her there. It was grim, I won't lie

- going to the BLM march where they toppled Colston and being really very excited but also very nervous about the crowds, especially when someone started playing a bloody saxophone right behind us

In the uk it was the immediate aftermath of the miserable December 2019 election; there was a soul-sucking protracted labour leadership contest, we got brexit done in feb, & when the plague hit it was like watching a slow motion train crash cause it was obvious weeks out that the cunts in charge would be inadequate to the task. I remember everyone being in complete denial, going about business as usual even as italian colleagues were talking about how bad it was over there.

My job then was basically entirely lab-based & we stayed open throughout the pandemic so I was working the whole time except for about a month at the beginning when we were quiet & I was able to "work from home". I didn't do any work but I didn't do anything else either except be vaguely stressed at how little I was doing - admittedly the circs were exceptional but it made me realise wfh is really not for me: my flat is tiny so I'd be spending all my waking & sleeping hours in one room p much. I got a proper orthopaedic desk chair from fb marketplace, most of one anyway. I drank a lot and made stupid (very clever) jokes

but as I say wfh is basically impossible for me so then I was walking the 4 miles to work (as noted upthread the weather was amazing that spring, & we were supposed to avoid public transport) & I don't think I will ever forget the eeriness of those walks, how I'd see almost nobody, no cars on the road at all, just the occasional bus that was completely empty of passengers driving around pointlessly - and on the side of these buses was an ad for a film that was supposed to have come out but now the cinemas were all closed & the film was shelved indefinitely: a quiet place 2

Because I live alone I was allowed to have a "social bubble" with another household - these friends of mine are both healthcare workers so we didn't get together that frequently but man what a release, we ate a lot of pizza and went thru the trash canon (miami connection!) I think we were a bit punch-drunk (also drink-drunk) but those were good times. Then yes there were the zoom chats with ilx ppl. Sanity saving. I drank a lot and made very clever (stupid) jokes

- funnily enough, I got very sick with a chest infection in Feb 2020. I doubt very much it was covid, but I have a distinct memory of feverishness and playing minecraft and now I hate minecraft. Anyway.
- we were all packed up and shipped off home from work with laptops, testing our home internet and ensuring we had backup mobile internet on top of it, in March.
- my birthday happened the weekend before full lockdown. The bar I'd booked a 20-person afternoon drinks table at arbitrarily closed its doors without contacting me that aftrnoon (wether due to lockdowns I dont know), they never contacted me or anything. I had to awkwardly try and text/facebook a heap of people and tell them to come to my house instead.
- I loved working from home. I still do. The company went back and forth with some in-office demands since lockdowns eased back up in 2021, but now they seem to have given up (prob cos its one way to keep good staff).
- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever. How my bf has not got fed up with me is anyone's guess but he hasn't.
- standing in line multiple times to wait for ou govt-provided covid vaccinations and boosters. How passively and politely pretty much everyone was about also doing so.
- I regret not pushing for us to move house while lockdowns were in force - the fact we had shut borders meant landlords were DESPERATE for tentants, and rental prices dropped massively. We'dve got a great deal. Now, its gone so far the other way we're too scared to even try moving - theres nothing available anymore.

Late-February 2020, our daughter had bad croup (cough like a seal's bark) coupled with a high fever so we took her to the ER in Santa Clara County* and every worker was wearing full PPE and handed us masks to wear when we checked in. My wife had been getting alerts that things were getting more serious here but seeing a sea of healthcare workers and doctors in full PPE was unlike anything I'd ever experienced (and I was traveling overseas quite a bit during SARS & H1N1).

*Andy mentioned upthread that the first US COVID fatality might have been at this hospital.

trayce otm - this is me too

- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever.

it took me way way longer than anyone i know to go anywhere. like a restaurant. i was store/home/local market for seemingly ever.

I work at home and usually have the house to myself during the day, so the first thing I remember besides the general sense of alarm and surreality is having to adjust to everyone being home all the time, my wife and two teenage boys. And for a while anyway, most of my reporting was completely remote. Learning to Zoom, all of that.

I think my job helped me deal with it psychologically, because I was immersed in it every day as a reporter, and having to be kind of a dispassionate, observer and conveyor of information. Also, even though it was all remote, I was still talking to lots of people all the time. So I didn’t have the same sense of isolation as a lot of people. But domestically, we did a lot of the same stuff as everybody. Cooking, baking, taking long walks. We live in an old neighborhood, and it has alleys everywhere. So we made kind of a project of going up and down all the alleys in the neighborhood. That was fun.

But I don’t want to be rosy about it. It was all very stressful. And by the end of the summer, my older son started having anxiety attack attacks for the first time in his life.

Attack attacks are like attacks, but more attacky.

there’s an elderly lady on my street, she lives alone and always seemed a little agoraphobic before but COVID seems to have fully broken her & it is very sad

I remember reading in some American paper like the Atlantic or the New Yorker that the best thing you could do in early March 2020 was to stop going to your office, so I showed it to some coworkers and we all started working from home. We’d always done about two days from home and we felt autonomous as contractors so we just all decided to do this and nobody stopped us. That job seemed to sort of melt away as fairly soon after I was told I would be finishing in May, after a few years contracting there. My birthday was a few days after the UK went into lockdown, I remember stockpiling a lot of food and booze. It was really weird doing Zooms at the kitchen table back then. I remember reading the numbers rising one night and feeling my heart rate increasing, like a really sudden spike of physical anxiety that I'd never really known before, the sense of something completely out of control.

My friend’s restaurant had just opened and had to close immediately for lockdown and I went over there and bought a lot of stuff off him, wine and cheese and butter. While we were there he gave some duck confit which he put into an industrial mayonnaise bucket topped with clingfilm. I remember getting back to my apartment that night and thinking it was that sort of “board the door” feeling from a post-apocalypse movie, and also that I didn’t want my neighbours to see me entering my home with a bucket of duck. There was a strange sort of comforting feeling of having everything you need and knowing you won’t be leaving the house which has stayed with me and is still a part of my life, and isn’t always so good, a kind of increased need for safety as some others have mentioned. I can't really shake it, I guess because I still work from home every day.

After the first job ended, I began working a lot on covid services for the UK government website. The pages I was responsible for are some of the most-used in its history, and it was often manic and crazy, but also sort of demanded me to use everything I’ve ever learned about my work and to draw on a lot of my own personality and resilience. This is weird too in that although it was stressful and crazy and all happening during lockdown it’s probably the work I’m most proud of in my life, and all my other jobs since have felt easy and lacking. I have considered that maybe I have or had some small version of trauma after that work, and the fact it all happened while mostly alone at home.

There are a lot of strange conflicts with covid, things that felt better among things that felt worse, things that only seemed bad after the opening up, the inability to remember what you were doing or wanted to do before you were temporarily prevented from doing it. I feel like a lot of the sense of control and being able to control every part of life has exacerbated some tendencies in me to lean towards safety and carefulness. I go out more than say in the immediate aftermath but I still am worried by small unpredictable things. I check the weather when flying more. I've had chronic illness problems since long before covid and maybe there was something nice about a world in which they sort of disappeared as a problem, because most activities were at home. I still live half in that world because of working at home. I still think of things as a sort of before and after even though if you’d asked me before I couldn’t have honestly said my life was perfect, not at all, and in fact a lot of stuff has improved, I bought a flat during the pandemic, I started exercising daily. I guess it just somehow seems the before was more innocent in a way I still can’t really understand.

It's weird even writing this how non-linear the memories feel. Christmases were so odd. 2020 I didn't get to go home to Dublin for the first time in my life at Christmas. Phoning my mum to tell her was really sad. After that I assembled a lot of stuff and did Xmas dinner with two of my oldest friends in London, which is a day I'll never forget, just the strangeness of it and the funny thing of the three of us buying each other presents and watching the usual Xmas stuff on TV. Christmas 2021 I had to isolate for a few days but was able to leave my room by the day itself. That too was weird and there was a lot of family tension and factions around the situation that took a little while to go away, for me anyway.

Another really vivid memory, one that will stay with me forever, for some reason, is the day after getting the first shot of the vaccine, around June 2021 I guess. I had a feverish night, teeth chattering one minute, drenched in sweat the next, then woke up with that feeling of the storm having broken, temperature normal, body functioning. It was a really sunny morning and at about 6am I walked to a shop absolutely craving orange juice, which I never really drink. I then went to the park and sat on a bench and drank my orange juice. I just remember that day feeling incredibly optimistic but also like a realisation of how difficult some of the times before had been. I remember just the feeling of walking, feeling good, the sun on my skin, and somehow really conscious of my body and how it felt versus the night before. But also that seems like some kind of resolution to it, even if that wasn't the end.

(hi everyone prob won't delurk again but all the posts here made me want to share also)

- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever.

Has anyone had the opposite experience? I find it difficult to stay home. Even if it's to the local Starbucks I gotta be out all the time.

A few things I remember, "en vrac":
- Video of bulldozers building a hospital in China in record time (Feb 2020)
- Sitting at home with nothing to do during the extra month at the end of my internship, which they had to pay me a real competitive salary + benefits (March 2020)
- Awesome weather, easy access to the river and countryside, reading Gravity Rainbow (April 2020)
- Being so relieved to land my first real job during the pandemic (May 2020)
- First infection and fearful monitoring of syndromes (October 2020)
- Death of my grandfather, followed by my grandmother, attended both funerals (end 2020)
- My wife losing several loved ones, who were all ridiculously young, us losing a best friend who was 34
- Those videos of this woman lipsyncing Trump talking about injecting yourself chemicals
- Reading graphs every day, pro- versus anti-
- Being bored and frustrated for months of 100% remote working
- The nightmare of travelling for work during Covid, the worst being denied access on a plane (at the gate) because of confusion of regulations as countries were dropping regulations but information was not circulating
- Getting over it

Some of the positive memories:

-getting to wfh for the first & only time

-my wife being furloughed and spending all day in the garden

-watching way too much Bon Appetite Youtube content and both of us doing some really ridiculously good cooking and baking

-being in great shape due to Youtube yoga + the usual exercise

There was bad stuff too of course but I look back fondly on a lot of it. Obviously we were very lucky, these same circumstances (wfh, furlough) would have been much harder if we had kids, didn't have my job, etc.

One of my favorite pastimes was making weird faces behind my mask while walking around the grocery store - puckering up my lips, wrinkling my nose, baring my teeth, etc.

Which reminds me, there was something weirdly sexy about having to guess what people looked like from just the upper face.

I went to a wedding on Feb 29 2020 and came away with a dry cough that lasted precisely 1.5 days. Spent a few weeks fretting I'd caught it and spread it but also baffled over whether that could really have been all it was for me, if it was. In the final week before first lockdown I was wearing gloves in the office except at my desk.

I'll never forget the weeks of warm sunny weather which felt unusual even for late Spring in southern UK...while we could barely be out in it and we had no garden (but also knowing how fortunate we were with the ease of sudden WFH for both of us). The palpable collective euphoria in parks that Summer too after the initial wave seemed to have passed was something else even if premature. Rivalled maybe only by Trump's defeat later that year + the vaccine news in the same fucking week.

We had additional luck in that when our cat died that Summer by that point they were allowing people in to the vet to witness pets passing.

I doubt I'll ever have a year like that for So. Much. time for music listening and discovery too.

Wow, I never even thought about that. it's hard enough to lose a pet, I can't imagine just dropping them off and not being with them in their final moments.

I(hi everyone prob won't delurk again but all the posts here made me want to share also)

A weird net positive for a lot of academic libraries with deep archives was that being closed meant the chance to get a lot of material that had been scanned but hanging fire for metadata etc happened big time. In our case, since by default all the access team members like myself weren’t doing anything (though I had some other online duties at least) that meant we did a lot of that work in 2020 to assist our archives and industry documents folks in clearing out a backlog. It was good work getting so much stuff read through — one of the more moving things I did was help out on AIDS History Project material, not merely for the obvious resonances, but seeing letters and mentions of people like Fauci and all. A real sense of continuity.

I was lucky in that nobody particularly close to me died or got seriously ill, but it was still surreal that it was happening to random people you knew. Like all the sudden "you hear who's on a ventilator?" and it's one of your neighbors, or someone who owned a restaurant you like, or one of your co-workers you had regular meetings with. Some of them pulled through but some of them didn't. Also hearing from people you went to school with, saying stuff like "I had a mild case but that was 6 months ago and I still feel tired all the time". It was scary. Didn't seem like it was worth it to do anything. Real apocalyptic vibes too with the wildfires. And then Trump on TV every day saying the stupidest shit you ever heard. I'm surprised I didn't have any sort of mental breakdown.

My neighbours' kids came home from university and spent the very hot April partying in their garden, which made my working from home pretty difficult. When my office reopened in the summer I was one of the first to go back and would often be the only person there in a space for 200 people. Walking through deserted central London and seeing shops still closed with Mothers' Day displays in their windows was bizarre. Once I was entirely alone in Lincoln's Inn Fields and could hear only the sound of a horse's hooves in the distance.

I must admit I wish I could've spent more time in deserted London, or really anywhere that would normally be busy. I got particularly envious watching one guy filming his stroll around the empty streets of Venice although I have no sense any more of when that was, could've been well into 2021.

I remember being initially sceptical of the Coronovirus news and then sitting in the office on a Friday in early March we all received an email telling that we were closing the doors and should work from home from the following week. I was healthy and felt protected. I had a 2 year old daughter and a partner who works in a hospital. I was more concerned for them. I think I really adapted to working from home full time but my employer was difficult and wanted me to use annual leave for any days I would be (through no choice of my own) looking after my 2 year old. This contributed to me feeling anxious over that period in addition to the health risks and isolation.

I miss the time on my own, with my child, as a family. We would exercise early in the little square in east London near where we lived. I bought pints of lager from the window of the pub on my street. Planning meals, drunken friends on Zoom calls, the increase in wildlife, change in the city sounds (much quieter), and the glorious weather. I miss how neighbourly and caring the local community felt. I miss my 96 year old neighbour. I obsessed over the first 5 Sault albums, the Test Pressing playlists and a few other records but bought less music. I did support a local shop by ordering online and the owner handing me the records from the window for a while.

I think I was always waiting for Covid to be over but when it happened it wasn't the release I was kind of expecting. I was, and still am, angry at the social impact of Covid. It seemed so unfair that people where dying before they needed to and people were making money out of this terrible time. We moved to be nearer my partners job in June 2021. It was overdue. I remember asking the estate agent about market conditions
and telling me that Covid created winners and losers. I went out to a restaurant and bar for the first time in October 2021. People had taken their masks off and so did I after a while. I got ill 4 days later and an ambulance took me to hospital 9 days later for a week. I regret that a lot. In some ways I'm still recovering.

It was a strange time. It feels like a dream.