Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

the pandemic started to hit close to home for me when a high school friend, who runs a family wine shop back in Illinois, reported that his dad (who co-founded it with him) passed away a couple weeks after getting covid, because a sick customer decided to come into the store unmasked. despite him wearing a mask, he caught it. this was pre-vaccine, and he was in his 70s.

it's kind of astonishing for me to think that for at least a solid year i didn't enter any businesses, just had groceries delivered or picked up.

the first time i ventured out anywhere to get food, May 2020, picking up food at a taco stand near downtown LA, the guy who was standing in front of me in line wandered off down the block after ordered and was promptly shot in a hail of automatic gunfire. i don't think i went out the rest of the summer after that.

just checked and it was 14 March 2020 that the person in the next town died after getting covid, so it was in the papers, one of the first nationally I think, and I looking back it set my risk assessment at higher than it would otherwise have been right from the start.

shit omar what was that?

It was a drive-by shooting, and it was never talked about on the news and never made the local papers and never even showed up on the crime report map as far as I could tell. Just the most insane random terrible thing buried in the middle of so much other terrible shit.

I started making all our meals in mid-March both because we were simply staying home and also because I didn't want to contribute to making people go back to work unnecessarily if it meant putting them at risk, but by the end of May I was going insane with the meal prep so we picked up fancy bistro dinner for my birthday and ate outside in a riverside park. The restaurant seemed happy for the business so I stopped feeling so bad about it after that.

xp jc Omar :(((((

Thanks, kinder.

That aspect was terrible in the details but broadly how we thought something would happen at some point - more alarming is that after my sister's family caught it, my brother-in-law was fucked up by it for several months - he's got a physical job (prison guard) and couldn't do it at all. Eventually he got the first vaccine, and turned around after a few weeks.

And myself and my wife, Jen, were really careful for longer than nearly everyone we knew, masking in shops and on buses (but not in pubs, but we just didn't go to pubs). One day we stopped? After I'd gone back down to London in July 2022, and masked on trains and busses and in a gig, and came back with Covid, as I'd joked I would. Jen caught it then, and we were both weary for a while, but we made it out - and then last April Jen got it and I didn't, and she had Long Covid for most of the year - after a month completely flat, she got back to where she'd probably have enough energy for a day at work (she switched her day off to Wednesday so there was never more than two days in a row) and then toss a coin whether she'd have enough energy to do anything else. And the end to this (since the UK has largely stopped supplying Covid boosters) came when she got the yearly flu jab - again, two wobbly weeks and a sharp return.

Bah, woe is not all I have to say about this, I'll have some other stuff soon but I suppose it does good to write it out.

(also jfc omar)

Sounds like you've had it rough, Andrew

“The big shutdown moment when the NBA cancelled a game minutes before tipoff and announced the league was suspending games until further notice came on the second evening of that trip.”

Oh, I forgot about this! My son was very into the NBA at that moment, and was following the games. I followed along with him. Vividly remember us texting back and forth about the cancellation, and both of us realizing in that moment that this was for real.

Yeah, when the Thunder/Jazz game was cancelled (March 11th?), that was the moment where I was 'holy shit, maybe this thing is for real and not just another SARS-type hysteria'

8:39 p.m.: As Frankie J left the court, the public-address announcer told the crowd to leave the arena because the game wasn't going to be played. "We are all safe," he said. "Please drive home safely, and good night, fans." Twenty minutes later, the NBA suspended the season following the March 11 games.

We knew at my Miami-based university that Something Terrible was coming as early as January -- I still have the emails. By late February we knew sooner or late our president would give the remote order. I was in North Carolina on March 11 when my dept chair called to ask, "Are you ready?" We went remote that weekend.

Despite what DeSantis did later in 2020, our county behaved quite well. I felt safe. I hung out with my best friend and family, part of my bubble, often that summer. We went on a beach vacation and felt totally safe in our respective cottages; we got takeout and would eat outside. Well into 2021 until the vaccines I ate outdoors if I ate out at all. Unlike many posters, I could not stand being alone. Once we learned that sitting outside and separated was safe, I hung out at a couple of liberal cafes where they respected these things. I realized I liked people, loved talking to bartenders, loved being out. Even so, I restricted activity beyond masked outdoor activity until May 2021 when my full vax immunity kicked in. My first indoor experience happened that summer. Then the Delta wave happened. I retreated. I returned with baby steps until the much bigger and deadlier Omicron wave, after which I retreated again.

I more or less returned to pre-2020 activity in September 2022 after an asymptomatic case -- the only time I've had COVID (I still test at CVS). I still mask on planes, crowded theaters, confined spaces, and wherever I feel safe.

I know I'm permanently scarred by the isolation of the early pandemic. Next time I bunk with someone and hunker down.

Next time I bunk with someone and hunker down.

wait, what 'next time'?? Are you keeping something from us?

I will live a long life and experience another pandemic after AIDS and COVID.

just as Bill Gates has planned

i mostly got the advance warnings from you all and a doctor that I knew who was sharing what was happening near him. the outbreak thread actually helped me understand the gravity of things better than the public messaging because it was kind of a repository of information in one place.

then fried my brain on twitter between 2021-early 2023

There's still some insane shit out there. I was reading otherwise sane Twitter/X feeds from mid 2020 that suddenly demanded total lockdowns between early December and late January. And it's a strange place to be when positions like this make you look like Ron DeSantis.

*b/w early December and late January 2023-2024

I have a friend that is sharing nonsense alarmism from a long-discredited crank, and the stuff they're sharing is so specific I know exactly who it is even though they've never specified it.

was amusing to get called a 'minimizer' when I basically lived under overcautious precautions for an extremely long time. but I just laughed.