Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

I think my main memory looking back was the timing of everything. I retired in the spring of 2019, sold my house in Toronto that summer, then moved to a small town two hours away. As 2020 started, my financial health was taken care of for life, and I had moved from a densely populated city to a town of 7,000 that was largely case-free for the first six months. I was so incredibly lucky, and I've tried to pay that back in a variety of ways ever since.

Lots else, good and bad, and the longest walks of my life around town in March and April, through streets that were virtually deserted. (Mild weather, I think.) I do tend to see life through the prism of art, though--should be the other way around--so a couple of non-personal things I think about.

The seventh episode of The Leftovers, where you see life the day before the Departure. You can't do that with Covid, which developed over a few weeks and months--there was no official start, even if we tend to use that day when the NBA shut down as the beginning. If you could, I'd like to see what my life was like the last day where I'd never given a thought to Covid, which was probably some day in February. I think the world was so different in so many small ways. I'm old enough that I don't see the need to spend time trying to figure out and describe all those ways, but people younger than me might want to.

There's also a speech in Mad Men I think about, Don talking to Peggy about why she's so good as an ad person. I'd try to quote it exactly, but I'm not sure which episode--Don speechified a lot. Anyway, he says something to the effect that she understands that something happened which changed the way people feel about themselves; he's referring to, without naming it, the JFK assassination. And because she understands that, she knows how to reach those same people. Same thing with Covid: something changed with people that I'd have a hard time describing.

I feel profoundly sorry for kids in school who had to miss so much, and I see the long-term effects of that every day.

When Sydney got all locked down I had a work exemption and sometimes had to drive into the city. The sci-fi filme eeriness of the familiar streets empty will stay with me.

Generally I felt fear and concern for humans both known and unknown - but more than anything else I think I felt relief that "business as usual" had stopped, that is something I had been craving for a long time

Working from home and having two school-age kids was tough and particularly tough on our youngest - I still feel his mental health is a bit knocked around by that time

I bought my dream turntable from a ludicrously cheap Gumtree ad early in 2020 and "tending to my records" (cleaning, new sleeves, organising, buying more of the fuckers) was a very therapeutic pursuit

My music taste definitely skewed nostalgic - listened to largely 60s/70s/80s stuff and it is only now that I feel like I am properly engaging with new stuff again - albeit still in a spotty kind of way

I still feel his mental health is a bit knocked around by that time

That's what I meant--mental health, socialization, graduations, field trips, etc., much more than academics. That's a concern, but you can fix that gap over time. Other things were missed for good.

Hm, that reminds me that the 'Covid Coping' series I did on my Patreon was really helpful in a 'stay engaged' way, even if I was listening to things old as well as new. Having the chance and discipline to write in a little detail about something each day anchored around a song was a good way to process things in a removed fashion.

Not necessarily during lock downs but I listened to Microphones in 2020 everyday during a period I was WFH.

― djh

For the entirety of '22 and most of '23 I just had _Dots and Loops_ on repeat in my car. It was the last record I listened to in the car with my ex. I guess that would be a good way of delineating it. When I took Dots and Loops out of my car things started to get better.

I still really like Dots and Loops, funnily enough. I don't have any negative memories at all associated with it. I just kept it in there because it's a good album. I just kept waiting to see when I would get tired of listening to it, and I never did. Probably the highlight of my life during that whole time period was listening to Dots and Loops. I wouldn't want to leave the house and I'd say well, if I do, then I can listen to Dots and Loops, and that was about the only thing that got me out of the house. So, I mean, kudos to Stereolab. They put out an album that soundtracked one of the most depressing and traumatic parts of my life and I still fucking love it.

I remember seeing this thread title and being like, Christ, why would I want to remember this time at all? But reading the responses of others was really nice, so I thought about it.

I remember my husband was in Singapore & Indonesia right when there were cases popping up there. I think the first reference I have to this affecting our lives was a text from him, in February 2020, talking about how the hotel he was staying in beeped his forehead to check his temperature on entrance. (Remember when places did that? Hahahaha.)

I remember when we started working from home and it didn’t feel like it would be for that long, and then it was. Time sort of collapsed due to the sameness of the days and I find it hard to pick out individual happenings from that time.

The slack was a godsend; we did a Christmas present exchange, regular zooms, and stuff like everyone buying scampi fries from Amazon and it becoming a thing for a while. A while ago I was in a pub with my mother and I bought a packet of scampi fries for us, which she had never seen me do, and took a picture with them. Impossible to explain, but it made me smile.

I made two of my best friends on slack and we have a WhatsApp group and we talk pretty much every day. Of all the things I expected as an outcome for the pandemic, I didn’t expect that.

I found it almost easier to make new friends than keep existing friends during the initial period of the pandemic where nothing was happening, because there’s no news. Nothing’s happening. When you’re making friends with new people, everything is novel. But when things opened up again, I wanted to see everyone, because I really felt the wasted time not seeing people. I remember going to dinner with ten of my friends in February right before stuff got really serious really fast and for ages we joked about calling it the last supper. Even now writing this is a good reminder to make plans with people.

I missed my family terribly. The first Christmas we had, I can’t even remember what happened. The Christmas omicron was circulating we had to cancel our flights to Ireland and I was so upset. I remember going on an impromptu trip to see my parents in January the year of the pandemic, and I think about that bit of serendipity all the time. I didn’t end up seeing my family in person until a year and a half later. Voice notes were always a thing we did but they became very important to us. My mother was in hospital with covid at one stage and I was so frightened she was sick enough to be admitted to a covid ward. My sister said I made this horrendous sound when she told me. I listened to her voice notes she’d sent me while I waited for news. Look, this was the pandemic, too much time to think.

I’d love to say I developed a new skill or baked bread or something, but no. I ended up getting into baseball in 2022 which in retrospect I couldn’t really have done in the same way back then (And I would probably have hated players for being antivaxx).

I think I say yes to things more. I went to New York with my family literally just on a whim after decades of not going on holidays with them, and it was fun. I arrange things. As a result I get invited to things more.

I have had covid at least twice that I’m aware of. I didn’t actually get it until 2022! The weird dreams and lack of taste were the worst symptoms for me. Both times my husband got it far worse. (My mother: “That’s men for you.” Yes, her that was in hospital).

It’s bizarre how “normal” things seem now. In New York I would see people wearing masks constantly and I haven’t seen that in a long long time. Ireland was way better about wearing masks than the UK from when I went home during the vaccine rollout stage, but I haven’t really seen many people wearing masks in public for a while. I assume they have covid if they do.

Yeah, in Ireland last June I didn't see a single mask wearer (my mom and I were the only ones wearing them on the Galway-bound train). Memories associated with lockdowns way more serious than America's, I gathered.

I live near a high school, and it's amazing how many kids are still masking, even when walking outdoors alone. It was explained to me that masks are almost like safety blankets for some kids, a way to sort of hide out. Four years is a long time when you're fourteen, I can see where they'd be fully acclimated to it.

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.

― frogbs, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 4:09 PM (six days ago)

https://i.imgur.com/1ysy1Ds.jpeg

https://www.instagram.com/p/C4TX8elrqK3/

I do feel like the early overconfident public health messaging of "don't want COVID? just wash your hands!", prior to all of the experts discovering it was airborne, lead to the weirdest deep-cleaning obsession in history, which really became COVID theatre when it was realized fomite spread contributes little to nothing to the overall spread and that most of the 'deep-cleaning' methods employed were probably no better than like...using those alcohol wipes.

when my mom got it last month, she was still wiping down everything in hyper-sanitize mode like it was March 2020, and I finally said "mom, if I get it, it's from breathing air you sneezed in, not you touching a counter".

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.
― frogbs, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 4:09 PM (six days ago)

I was at rehearsal for a Fringe Festival play that night. Things were already looking ugly when I left to drive there. We had only just entertained for the first time at rehearsal the "non-zero possibility" that the entire festival would be cancelled, but nobody put it at more than like a 25% chance. right as we were being dismissed, the news that Trump had banned travel from Asia hit, and that Tom and Rita Hanks had gotten it.

I got to my car, and saw the news about the Jazz game (which had been cancelled an hour prior, but I hadn't seen it). I spent about 30-40 minutes in my car reading news and not leaving to go home and during that time the NBA suspended its season. by the time I got to my house I knew I was going to be seeing a lot of it and nothing else for a while.

To this day using wipes -- I SEE this every day -- is way easier for many people than masking. It requires no sacrifice.

And I gotta say if people washed their hands more, this is no bad thing.

well no argument there.

I remember the horrifying speed with which things changed. On 29 Feb I went to a football match along with thousands of people and the world was basically normal. Three or four days later I was at a committee meeting for my cycling club and we were making plans for the various spring and summer events and COVID wasn't even mentioned, didn't even enter our thoughts. Two or three days after that I remember having conversations about what was happening in Italy and thinking 'it's coming here next' but still feeling like we had a month or two to get ready. Then everything just collapsed. No toilet roll, then no pasta/rice/cans of soup, then no fresh food at all at the supermarket. More and more colleagues and students who I was supposed to be teaching off sick or staying at home in fear. My daughter's school having to send whole year groups home because of a severe lack of staff. The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer. Boris Johnson announcing that many will die before their time and then just fucking off and vanishing for several days leaving everyone to panic in a vacuum. Doom scrolling Twitter about just how bad it could get and either not being able to get to sleep or waking up at 4am full of fear. Monday 16 March about a third of my students were missing and all anyone wanted to talk about was the pandemic situation. The next day two thirds were missing. Wednesday 18 March I had just 1 student left. Everyone knew we were going to be closed down and couldn't understand why we were being forced to carry on going to work. I went to Sainsbury's in the evening and there was literally *no food* left at all. When the lockdown was eventually called, at least a week, probably two weeks later than it should have been, I just felt massive relief.

"The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer"

that was horrifying at the time. I had two members of my family with cancer and my partner with MS and dementia. I felt like there would be nobody left in my life after it hit the UK.

When dad had his gallbladder out and I was staying with the folks to help with recovery, I was so worried about getting it and giving it to Dad that I wore my "mask" (a balaclava that me sweat) indoors for 14 hours a day.

Mostly because I made a lot of trips to the store then out of necessity

echo all of that NBS, thats very close to what i remember , and how i remember it hitting me

Sometime in mid-to-late February 2020 I read a story about it spreading in China and they couldn't stop it. I somehow just knew if it got to the US we were so open and dysfunctional we wouldn't be able to either. That weekend I went to the store and bought $300 of shelf stable food: pasta, rice, beans, cans of tomato, etc. I should have bought toilet paper instead. Oh well.

The night the NBA stopped playing games I called my boss and told him I was working from home indefinitely. I had worked with them for 19 years and they needed me so I was lucky I could do this. I went into work very early the next day, grabbed a small box of things I would need and split. The next week everything shut down including my company.

When my kids had to start doing remote learning from home it was tough, but they finished at noon and then... what? And like an angel sent from above it became apparent that a loose group of ping pong players in the neighbourhood were playing every day, in the Olympic Park, a 10 minute walk from my house. And my two boys became obsessed with ping pong. A Whatsapp group was started. We all got to know each other. So every day the boys would finish their schoolwork, we'd give them sandwiches in a bag and they'd race to the park with their paddles and a big bottle of water. The weather was sensational. Eventually some of the guys there (it was 90% guys)started bringing a chess board, because there were only two tables and maybe a dozen people who wanted to play. So those who weren't on the tables played chess. This literally happened every week day. For months. So when people talk about the mental health problems that lockdown caused kids, we really dodged a bullet. It was one of the greatest little spontaneous displays of community togetherness I've ever witnessed.

Tracer that's great (as tbh your posts on ILX of experiencing COVID at the time haunt me to this day).

I took this photo Jan 26 2020 at Bank tube station, in pouring rain:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49461142038_3c78ce7e14_c.jpg

After that there were weeks of... birthdays, trips to L'pool and Amsterdam, galleries and days out, gigs, bowling... no masking anywhere, just half-hearted attempts at social distancing, hand-washing stations in the office. Then, Mar 12 - "WFH for two weeks, it's experimental". I've been back to the office maybe 15 times in four years.

I recall the neighbours hired someone to spray 2m chevrons on our lane in late April, and we got this instead :)

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49834655143_c301788756_c.jpg

That bank station picture is incredible, Michael. Real Vertigo Comics panel energy.

we pulled our kid out of school a week before LAUSD officially closed its doors. we pretended he was sick. but really, it was a bad idea to slow-walk the closures so we kept him home, and explained to him why. one other family we talked to did the same. LAUSD actually dealt with the pandemic *exceptionally* well after they shut down. the superintendent at the time was someone who folks regarded with a bit of side-eye in the wake of the teacher's strike a year or so previous, but he did a very very good job.

i remember going to half a dozen grocery stores the day the big panic-buying started and i wound up getting the scraps of what remained. so many pierogis. and andouille sausages. in the end, we went to Ikea to go grocery shopping and they were stocked up, so we got a ton of swedish meatballs and gravlox.

my mom was visiting at this time, she flew in on March 7 for a visit. I suggested she might want to postpone and she thought it would be ok. flying maskless on a crowded plane to L.A. on that date was, in retrospect, taking a gamble. but she was fine. of course, 17 days later, when i dropped her off at LAX (a much bigger gamble but she had masks by then), there were fewer people traveling. anyone familiar with LAX knows this photo is not usual --

https://i.imgur.com/3JYgGuf.png

Los Angeles was dead for quite awhile. I could stand in the middle of the street with the kid and play catch for an hour and see two cars. and at the time, it felt risky because we weren't wearing the masks outside! we kinda knew we'd be okay, but we didn't *know*.

Hollywood was dead on a Friday night, even.

https://i.imgur.com/RRzpbCq.png

https://i.imgur.com/nFFaoTA.png

we remained fully locked down for i'm sure at least a year, and our kid didn't attend school in person until fall of 2021. we remained more locked down than most due to my wife needing to visit her dad, who was isolated and living alone. she visited her mom to, but her mom was in a group home and they could only wheel her to the sliding glass door in the backyard so she could see her from outside. her mom couldn't see and wouldn't recognize her if she could, so it was even more of a one-way thing. like visiting a zoo. it was so hard on her. her parents both died the same week, Thanksgiving week 2021, her dad in failing health after a fall, probably indirectly related to being locked down and less mobile. he fell and was found shortly after by his in-home caregiver (part-time, we couldn't afford more) and just never recovered. what a guy he was -- a gentle soul. and her mom...a journalist turned teacher, gone too soon, so immediately kind to me it was like finding a second mom.

my career evaporated during the pandemic, it's still tough times. i don't feel old but according to others i got old and honestly it's probably for the best. i still don't really know what i'll do next for longer-term prospects vs what i've pieced together. but i can't complain too much. i guess i had a decent run.

our friendships changed -- we stopped hanging out with some people, not as a political statement but due to our own general caution, and many just kept on being social with their "pod" being very large. many of them caught covid multiple times.

we survived psychologically, at least in terms of the pandemic stuff. my kid thrived somehow and remained his relentlessly cheery self.

i think in the end, we were happy to be where we were in L.A. since everyone was on board with being careful and respecting others, and politically it was the best place to be i suppose. for me the pandemic took a turn earlier when Trump lost in 2020, walking thru the hood w/everyone celebrating and listening to "FDT" by YG at a corner gas station, most people wearing masks, me turning to someone standing next to me and saying "This is fucking incredible!" and she replied, "SOOO incredible!" and i realized it was A1ia $hawkat. haha if we only knew we couldn't kill what was already dead! FDT and F covid too.

January: I quit a horrible job that I hated and that was hurting my well-being. Good timing, because it was in a school and things were about to go completely impossible for schools and my work environment was already toxic as hell. Later in January we made a point of going to Chinese restaurants which were being hit by anti-Asian xenophobia/racism and fears of disease from the stories coming from China, a brief period perhaps when dining out but there were no lines at Nan Xiang.

February: While aimlessly wandering around a picturesque historic park one day, I felt the return of something that had been out of reach for so long I didn't even recognize it--which after some introspection I decided was probably happiness. I wasn't kidding about the job, it was killing me.

March: I woke up in Brooklyn and looked at the way the morning light brightened my bedroom walls and decided that if this was the end of normal life, I was going to act decisively. I packed a lot of bags and called my partner to come get me, and effectively moved to the country. I only had this option because he moved out of NYC a couple of years prior, which is turns out was ALSO great timing.

Spent the next 3 years living my cottage-core gardening dreams.

this thread is hard to read but someday i hope to write some sort of more measured reminiscence of how things were and what happened.

the pandemic was like a bomb that went off in my life. i still don't understand the extent of the trauma but everything is different now. some things are better, for sure, and then there are other nagging things (like a loss of trust in "people" in general, knowing that 100M+ people in the U.S. alone are horrible people who do not care at all about anything except themselves, heavily confirmed by the 2016 election and then extra heavy no doubt confirmed by the pandemic) that i'm not sure what to do with. i expect a lot of other people feel the same, but we can't even get it together to designate a shitty national day off of work for the 1.1M who died in the u.s., because absolutely no one wants to talk about or remember it. (this makes me pessimistic about the next pandemic). so i really doubt there will be some sort of "national conversation" about coming to terms with collective trauma. the collective trauma is already under the rug, down there with vietnam and shit.

i fondly remember getting on a crappy video chat iphone app called marco polo and making/watching/sharing all sorts of really weird video messages with a close group of friends for several months straight. i'd wake up and watch 10 minutes of marco polo every morning before work, just catching up with my friends' routines and dilemmas. it was nice, and i miss it in some ways, as the status quo of the occasional text message / funny meme has replaced the daily chatting and bonding that was there in april/may 2020

I know what you mean - 4 people I knew died from it and it didn't feel like anyone got to really process the losses at all. there were funerals but not like what you had pre-COVID. just people going "whoa, that's crazy" in the groupchats. even now it's like these people are barely even remembered. just people who existed in some sort of "before time"

i've often had the (incredibly depressing) idle thought that i wish there could be a day where everyone who knew someone who died from covid just walked outside and stood on the sidewalk for about 10 minutes. just to look up and down the street and see who else is standing there. no words, no signs, no bloodcurdling screams threatening revenge against trump (that rule is for me) - just standing there for a second and seeing who else is there

(i feel like a prequel to 1984 could explain that just before fascism took over, there was a pandemic, a shocking and relentless display of inhumanity from half of humanity, the end of the pandemic, followed by the first implementation of 2-minutes-hate, which initially was two large groups shouting about the other but eventually merged into one)

lol, sorry! just read what i typed over the last few minutes, and yeah, i shouldn't be on this thread. the cool part about believing hundreds of millions of people are straight up evil is that i really do believe that the other hundreds of millions of people fucking kick ass and do care about other people.

"The news from Italy getting grimmer and grimmer"

I'm certain I've said this already but a Guardian article headlined something like "Letter from Italy" had a massive influence on me - I recall stuff about care homes being abandoned (with the residents still in there), relationships failing under the trauma of stuff, queues outside of shops (and friends making sure they were in the same queues, so at least they saw each other).

I keep getting bogged down, trying to post here. Like, my brain wants to do this precise timeline and no, that's awful. So:
I started 2020 with one cat and now I have 7. I went from flying 50k+ miles per year to zero. I went from working 80+ hours/week to retired to consulting on 2 24/7 projects to working an incredible job I fully enjoy. I suffered the worst depression/anxiety/insomnia I've ever dealt with, got help, got lucky with meds, got lucky with therapy. Lost 4 people I was close to in the course of 2 weeks mid-2020. My grandson was born healthy and hale in July 2020 and I was able to meet him in person right before his 1st birthday. Moved house twice. Got over my intense needle phobia. Lots of bad stuff relatively balanced by good stuff.

I remember telling my son, in maybe late March 2020: “Don’t worry. This will be over by May.” He’s never let me hear the end of that.

I went to a local shop that first weekend and it was decimated, ransacked even. That afternoon, I drove to a farm shop (not quite as posho as it sounds, but not far off) and there was this apocalyptic atmosphere: huge queues, the stink of slurry in the air, everyone wild-eyed and frantic. At one point, a white van pulled up, driving aggressively close to the queue; three huge blokes got out and pushed their way to the front. I remember thinking 'fuuuck, this could escalate quickly'.

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, March 12, 2024 1:57 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whoa.

xp - Well, to be fair, there was A LOT of messaging that we just needed to "flatten the curve" for a few weeks and it'd all blow over!

Also none of us alive right now had a very valid frame of reference for a global pandemic!

I think I’ve erased a lot of the worst of the pandemic in my mind, or muted it. A response to trauma maybe. But there was a big, rough stretch of 2020 (pre-election) of just gaping, desperate fear and sadness and wondering if life would ever return to normal. I worked from home long before COVID (and do now) and when work would end for the day I would push the laptop way and reach for my phone and doomscroll, in a daze, until suddenly it was time to get a shower and go to bed. I just couldn’t believe that we were in the worst situation and led by the absolute worst person possible in that moments. It was crushing:

(I do recall, vaguely, some very surreal supermarket low-stock situations, and the randomness of what I could get. How awful I’d feel wearing a mask for what seemed like forever, until I started to get used to it. A stepsister buying everyone masks; getting into the mask-making business and selling them to family for cheap.)

... and then finding out that only N95s really worked worth a damn :(

I remember a friend of mine went with the "face shield" option, he still has long COVID

I messaged a hoos one day in desperation: "WHAT CAN I DO? What are we doing? Where is the organizing in this moment?" and he was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and then a mutual aid group in a nearby town asked for more online administrative support, and I volunteered. And I'm still doing it! Actually it got me a part-time job for about a year and has completely changed my life. I finally understand what I want to do (build self-reliant community networks) and found so many people to learn from.

It was a weird summer though, cognitively. There were deffo times I sat down at the computer and read something 5 times and felt a wave of panic that it didn't make sense. That may also have been menopause though, xp to the "There Will Not Be Blood" thread. Hard to tell in 2020.

we had one friend die during the pandemic, a bit over a year after it started. don't know how he got covid, but he was feeling under the weather and apparently said he'd go to the hospital the next day, went to bed, and died in his room overnight.

a friend's aunt died in the worst way possible.. alone in a hospital, facing the floor in a ventilator (to drain the lungs)... a lot of people went like that, we forget what an awful ending it was for so many

I've heard about a possible (U.S.) national covid memorial in the works, not sure where they're at in the planning stages

i think they're in the "planning to plan until it's not a political issue" stage, so given how long it has taken for the GOP to acknowledge climate change, 20-30 more years minimum, and only kicking and screaming for some of them, even then

I dont think I know of anyone who died from covid but one aunt died during lockdowns (she was old and ill anyway) and they had to do a mostly-absentee funeral.

I do know multiple people who have been quite crippled by long covid. One has developed really bad heart problems for example.

One of my wife's law partners who she worked with for 18 years died in the first weeks. His wife never saw him in person alive after he went into the hospital that first week. That certainly framed our early covid experience.

I do not know anyone personally who died, but def friends/relatives of friends. I know one person with long COVID as noted above. My early experiences were nowhere near as harsh as many that are described here, I was relieved to work from home and it was actually feasible. I do remember days before the mid-March shutdown giving a customer a ride from work to a UPS place maybe half a mile away, we disinfected everything but of course did not open the windows of the truck.

The weekend of March 5 we went to the funeral of a local activist found dead in his room after two days; in November 2020 we learned it might've been COVID. He was the only person I know infected between March 2020 and March 2021. My friends and relatives started falling like trees in the post-omicron period in 2022. I got an asymptomatic case in September 2022, so I still don't know what symptoms are like.

Whatever wave it was in early 2022 had a big negative impact locally: bodies were stacking up because so many licensed crematory operators were out sick. It took until September for the backlog to be cleared at the largest crematory in the state, running 24/7.

that was one thing that pissed me off when fighting with the "Plandemic" crowd. people saying things like "if this was really what public officials said, you'd see an overflow of bodies with nowhere to put them" and it was like THAT'S LITERALLY HAPPENING, YOU FUCKING IDIOT, they are using refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues right now

I have to credit my genius friend from high school and my partner who was following what was happening in Asia for mentally preparing me for the pandemic. Honestly they both got a huge jump on most of the country, if not more.

My partner was frantically looking for N95 masks, which apparently were cleaned out around our area. We were told it was primarily the Asian residents of Flushing, with many of them far more concerned about a potential pandemic since it obviously was already having a huge impact in Asia. I reached out to my family in the Midwest as they were far from the city, and their local Home Depot had plenty of N95 masks so we got some that way (as well as some for my family, which they were soon glad to have). I took it as a "just in case," and moved on with my life, but over the course of a 6 or 7 weeks, the country was getting more worried. Then the day before lockdown happened, my friend was texting me, and I STILL have those texts:

You really shouldn’t be going into work. How is it possible that what is happening in Italy won’t happen here? In 2 weeks most businesses will be shut down and travel around the country restricted. And lots of ppl will die.

As I read these, I looked out my window and it was just so fucking surreal - like life still LOOKED normal and I actually just got back from the bank to have something notarized. (In an awkward moment, I just sat there nodding to the nice guy who helped me, and I think he was expecting a handshake because of my body language and verbal thank you, but I was too paranoid to touch anyone at that moment.)

He sent these as he was packing his family into his minivan to drive off to his wife's family's rural home in Virginia or West Virginia, where they'd have plenty of space and isolation, and inside the minivan was three months worth of emergency packs that he bought a month earlier when they were still readily available through Amazon.

An hour later, we found out someone who called in sick was now coming down with flu-like symptoms, so we all were sent home. We never came back to the office.

That weekend, my partner then gave me an academic periodical (forgot which) that was published like a month ago - it was about COVID and every epidemiologist was matter-of-factly agreeing that it was only a matter of time before COVID reached the U.S. It wasn't a guess, it was a sure bet given how the disease was spreading, something that was par for the course for viruses like it even if the actual effect on anyone infected by it was new territory. Anyway, in retrospect, it just seemed like a lot could and should have been done to prepare people, but most people were in denial and of course we had an ignorant and morally bankrupt asshat running the country.

Quick correction, those texts were issued on March 12, so the co-worker getting sick happened a few days later