Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

Now that we're approaching the four year anniversary, I thought we could have repository of our early days memories
Those first Zoom calls.. people crossing the street to avoid each other... wiping down groceries with alcohol... meeting friends in the park but sitting in a giant circle.. coyotes howling in the Financial District

I was just putting toilet paper away, and I still have a roll of this really awful stuff that I bought four years ago.. made in vietman, visible wood chips in the paper, and it cost nine dollars for four rolls at a convenience store

Anyway, this is where we can share the good, the bad, the sad

Funny, I never suffered a toilet paper shortage -- I was usually the guy who brought my parents toilet paper from the store and leave it early in the morning outside their door.

The first week felt like a vacation: we were supposed to come back in April, remember? But on a vacation things are open and you can hang out with friends. The psychological toll didn't become apparent until early or mid April. It sucked.

Yeah, I remember when they warned that this 'could last as long as six weeks'(!)

I started my last in-office job on March 16, 2020. (My previous full-time in-office job had ended in May 2017; I'd been freelancing and doing contract work from home since then.) On Wednesday, March 18, we were told we would be working from home for the time being. My initial 90-day contract was not renewed at the end of June, because the job was doing social media for a medical school and there was basically no activity to share, other than media hits by professors being interviewed about Covid.

I remember going to the store for the first time when we had to stand outside in line because only a certain amount of people were allowed inside the store at one time. I felt extremely maudlin and dissociated.

I also remember another grocery trip to a large international market where the store music started playing the Sufjan Stevens song "Chicago." At first I thought I might be dead bc this was all too surreal to be real, and then I realized I wasn't dead and this was reality and I started crying in the frozen food aisle near the pierogi/dumpling area.

i remember lots of walks in the phoenix park, which we were lucky to have on our doorstep at the time.

On April 20 we celebrated a good friend's birthday -- my first contact with people outside my family -- in his backyard. Just four of us. We had three tables set up about twenty feet apart. Masks to use the bathroom.

I remember going to the store for the first time when we had to stand outside in line because only a certain amount of people were allowed inside the store at one time. I felt extremely maudlin and dissociated.

Yeah, my wife and I were standing in line outside Target and the woman ahead of us felt like we were too close; she looked back at us and exclaimed, "Six feet! Six feet!" We took a step backwards and she visibly relaxed.

Trying to remember when we switched from just wearing bandanas over our faces to actual masks. It was probably only a few days but it seemed like longer.

Hardly anyone was driving so the air smelled so clean for months. I wish it could have lasted forever.

oh god i just remembered teaching online the first few weeks and one of my students had her autistic 12 year old son at home too (because obvs he wasn't going to school either) and he was giving her a very hard time and screaming "I fucking hate you" so loud that she had to mute. But she didn't know how so we all heard it :(

i remember finding some solace in the truth that no one knew what they were doing and we were all just doing our best, whatever that means.

I was just in a grocery store last weekend that had faded strips of red tape on the floor, six feet apart leading up to the cash register

We'll probably be seeing these reminders for years to come

I had a bag of surgical masks from, like, 2011 left over from a bad cold. I used them and whatever shitty fabric masks you could buy on Amazon before they became available. To think that KN95 masks didn't become easily available until mid '21!

Trying to remember when we switched from just wearing bandanas over our faces to actual masks. It was probably only a few days but it seemed like longer.

I remember the first few days when we'd all been sent home, taking long walks around our neighborhood with bandanas and balaclavas around our noses and mouths. A few days into it (though in retrospect it feels much longer), my mom had handmade some masks she sent out to the whole family. Obviously those turned out to not be "safe" masks anyway, but it's a strong memory of the second half of March 2020 for me. Those were the days of the "flatten the curve" signs in some houses, while things were quiet just before the sirens became near constant to the nearby hospital.

I specifically remember the day we turned the corner and saw the field tent in the hospital parking lot that had been constructed, literally, overnight. That was really a "holy shit" moment for me.

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 had a bag of surgical masks from, like, 2011 left over from a bad cold. I used them and whatever shitty fabric masks you could buy on Amazon before they became available. To think that KN95 masks didn't become easily available until mid '21!

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, March 12, 2024 2:52 PM (six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

I had a pack of n95s in my desk from about a decade earlier as well. A colleague came to work sick - coughing, sneezing, etc. - and I marched down the street to CVS because damned if I was going to catch this guy's cold. But when I got back to my desk, I was too embarrassed to wear them, so I just caught his cold anyway. I found them in my desk when I snuck back to the office in May 2020 to nab my monitors and docking station, and was like "score!"

also everyone was sewing masks and giving them to friends. i gave an erstwhile ilxor (carl agatha) an old vintage dress that she turned into masks, and my sis in law (who has since contracted and died of cancer) made a bunch of masks for the family too.

I specifically remember the day we turned the corner and saw the field tent in the hospital parking lot that had been constructed, literally, overnight. That was really a "holy shit" moment for me.

same! same hospital too iirc

Good topic. Out and about right now, but will jot down some thoughts later.

The period in February 2020 just before the formal UK Lockdown was really scary: I work in the UK public sector and rumours were abounding that Ministers had just been briefed that tens of thousands of people were expected to die, and were shocked and 'scared shitless', and that government was exploring requisitioning football stadiums to store the bodies.

My "Holy Shit" moment was walking through Camden Market on the afternoon of 13 March 2020 after a work event and it was apocalyptically deserted.

same! same hospital too iirc

ha, yep! assuming it is indeed.

It was April. All the restaurants were closed and most of them hadn't figured out how to convert to take-out, yet. We would walk through our neighborhood streets around suppertime smelling hamburgers being grilled everywhere we went. It became a joke.

We have always cooked our own meals at home, so our diet was far more varied than hamburgers. otoh, I recall the challenge of making one grocery shopping trip to buy 15 to 17 days worth of fresh food for two and not having any food spoil before it was eaten, shuffling along in the line of people waiting to be admitted to the store, six feet apart, wearing a homemade cloth mask. People were always polite, but we didn't converse.

The public library closed and stayed that way for many months. We're big readers, but luckily I always have at least 30 books waiting on the shelf. The main problem became finding reading material that could be enjoyed when everything in life was skewed and depressing. We ran through a lot of our old DVDs on nights we would normally have read books.

I was sent home from work right around March 16th or 17th, with a laptop.. I didn't even have home internet! But my quick-thinking girlfriend called the library and I borrowed a wifi hotspot for three weeks until I could get something more permanent through work

key memories

- wearing an N-95 for the first time at the farmers market: couldn’t breathe right, felt so panicked, felt like I was in a horror movie, all i could see were masks everywhere & scared eyes, got back to the car & had a massive panic attack

- going to the supermarket: checkout attendants looking so scared behind perspex barriers; toilet paper shelves completely empty; watching couples double up on TP and join separate checkout lines & feeling RAGE

- our office went remote by march 20th iirc and we stayed permanently remote to this day. thought i would hate it, did at first, but love it now wouldnt trade it for anything

We were very lucky: our public libraries resumed curbside service the first week of May! You'd reserve the book online, then pick it up.

The second week of June the libraries reopened to the public with limited occupancy and face masks required (and a security guard enforcing the rules). THAT was my lifeline. I'd spent hours at my laptop and browsing the shelves for stuff I'd never usually read.

I live in Wisconsin where the Tavern League has an insane amount of influence over local law for whatever reason. All the businesses and restaurants were closed but many of the bars were still open. It was so surreal to drive around at night and see the whole town dead except these little corner bars which were still all lit up.

Mid-March 2020 and maybe like a day or two before we learned that a case had been reported in our office and on our floor (and, like, not shared publicly with the employees who were about to walk out in droves if we hadn't gone fully WFH the next day), but numbers were slowly increasing in Chicago and everyone was understandably on edge. I was walking down the street and saw two business dudes approach one another and automatically shake hands as business dudes do, and both of their faces just immediately melted into expressions of dread at the realization of the deadly plague that they had so casually passed on to one another (RIP, business dudes).

The weather in the first six weeks was incredible, particularly for the UK in April. We were only supposed to take an hour of exercise, but the countryside was so deserted that I was doing longer and longer loops from my house. One of my main memories is of opening farm gates with my elbows, and, if I absolutely had to use my hands, sanitising immediately. It was irrational but somehow the idea of infection pervaded everything.

Same in South Florida -- the mildest of springs.

I remember flying from LA to Atlanta just after Garcetti's stay at home order came out. The crew took an extra hour to clean the plane before we got on. It was surreal, I felt like I was in a movie.

Remember the NYC morgue trucks? Such grim imagery, I kept thinking of The Andromeda Strain or some dystopian sci-fi movie

https://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2020/04/01/Photos/ZH/MW-ID515_NYCtru_20200401095435_ZH.jpg

Definitely a time. My running assumption is that baking sourdough and watching Tiger King consumes a lot of memories then. In SF it was more this sense of a slow motion build that was in the air for weeks, thanks in part to regular flights between East Asia and here in particular. I remember seeing my first maskers in public in early February, then of course there was that cruise ship docked in the bay itself. The real tell was the slow reduction in gathering size over the final three weeks before lockdown — I went to a slew of shows then and was on the verge of another when hours beforehand the mayor basically said “That’s it.” It was a Friday so I locked up the library and I believe a day later told my supervisors that according to city regulations (my library is essentially a split between the city and my campus) we had to stay closed. Didn’t go back even quickly for an equipment overview for surely months; location didn’t reopen until last May.

My one on-point comment at the time to Kate was that we were about to see who could actually live with themselves if they had to stay put and chill for a bit. I still think that the very idea of it drove people beyond a boundary that they have never recrossed; I get human connection and its need and all but the sense of a slew of extroverts who absolutely had no idea what to do was pretty clear.

i remember putting a lot of effort into cooking new things, planning movie nights, reading up on pieces of info on jobs that could be done around the place.

got very productive for a burst of the first six months or so

(may not have lasted)

xp my ex and I actually drove out to see the cruise ship at the Port of Oakland... we actually got pretty close, there were no security staff and we just walked right up to it; a lot of ambulances coming and going

One of the first recorded deaths (maybe THE first recorded death in the U.S.) was a woman in Santa Clara, thought with hindsight there were probably many more - they just didn't know the cause of death at the time

My one on-point comment at the time to Kate was that we were about to see who could actually live with themselves if they had to stay put and chill for a bit. I still think that the very idea of it drove people beyond a boundary that they have never recrossed;

*raises hand* I learned a few things that spring and summer. I'm an introvert but not shy. Except for an outdoor visit to my parents' on Fridays I was on my own seven days a week for weeks. It crushed me.

I'd do it again if I had to, only this time I'd insist on moving in with a friend.

My brother lives by himself. The isolation was not good for him at all. He became absolutely convinced he had stomach cancer. (He didn't."

I routinely met a couple buddies for beers down by the lake, starting almost immediately... I think we had a somewhat fatalist idea of our meetups because we didn't necessarily social distance as diligently as we should have

But those hangs helped save my sanity

In retrospect, to keep from dredging up painful memories of how bad my mental health got some months, I try to hold onto the undeniable good (and there was, actually!) to come out of it. Which isn't to say I want to minimize the very real suffering or imply it was a good time, but I remain ever thankful that I was able to have a lot more time with my school age kid than I would have through those first 18 months or so.

Yeah, as the relative safety of outdoor activity became clear, I used to go to a friend's for an outdoor happy hour a couple times a week. She wouldn't even let me in the house: I'd go around the back and she'd bring a drink out to me. She wouldn't let me tip.

After waking up at 5:30 a.m. every workday and commuting two hours each way for 14 1/2 years, I felt peace! It helped that remote work technology had caught up by then. As an introvert it was great (I lived with my brother though, and had two cats, so not alone. The cats loved us being home all the time.). For the first several months also I didn't have any sick family or friends, until a close friend maybe had a medical emergency that was ostensibly not COVID but I still wonder.

A good friend lost his mom to Covid.. I knew her pretty well. She got it at a rehabilitation hospital that was neglecting safe practices.. he's still pretty bitter about it

We moved out of the city in the middle of the pandemic, first to a rental and then bought a house. I will probably get rotten eggs with "check your privilege" written on them thrown at me for saying it, but I have a lot of good memories from that time. It was scary and strange, but we were very lucky to be able to do what we did. I got to watch a lot more of a crucial time in my kids' growing up than I would otherwise. I have really sweet memories like watching them learn to roller skate on the driveway, the fake "day camp" my wife invented for them where they learned about different countries, nice BBQs, long walks and hikes (and my kids learning to actually enjoy hikes), all kinds of absurd imaginary games and stories we invented, funny songs they made up, doing a puzzle late at night with my then 5yo when she couldn't sleep, seeing fox and groundhog in the yard and the kids giving them names, simple pleasures like pizza delivery seeming extra enjoyable, etc. I got really attached to an orb weaver spider I found in our yard spinning its web. I remember one night sitting in the back yard and I heard jazz, like actually surprisingly good modern jazz, wafting from the distance, and I just went walking and followed the sound until I found a very tiny outdoor socially distanced concert in someone's yard and watched from across the street.

It all sounds very corny and NPR and oblivious I know, but it was part of my experience. There was of course stress and isolation and worry too, but the feeling of the nicer parts of it is unlike anything I've experienced at any other time in my life.

I wouldn't say the pandemic was a root cause of our moving from urban New Jersey to rural Montana, but the pandemic — and specifically seeing how many industries shifted to remote work much more seamlessly than one might expect, and how much people seemed to like that and refuse to "return to the office" later — definitely planted the seed in our heads that hey, we can live anywhere, there's no financial/professional reason we have to stay where we are.

we bought our home during covid, moved in in july 21

wouldnt have happened without covid savings and remote working

I got to watch a lot more of a crucial time in my kids' growing up than I would otherwise.

Yeah, this is what I was getting at.

and specifically seeing how many industries shifted to remote work much more seamlessly than one might expect

And yet, so many of those very same industries (or at least companies) were already by 2023 furiously backtracking that, actually, "remote doesn't work". *insert all of the eyerolls here*

yeah, our CEO was writing things about how 'we can't wait to get everybody back into the office!' Then she bought a house in Florida and hasn't brought that shit up again

My one on-point comment at the time to Kate was that we were about to see who could actually live with themselves if they had to stay put and chill for a bit. I still think that the very idea of it drove people beyond a boundary that they have never recrossed; I get human connection and its need and all but the sense of a slew of extroverts who absolutely had no idea what to do was pretty clear.

― Ned Raggett

i'm managing to live with myself better than i used to. my ex-wife, on the other hand...

it's hard to sort the memories out. i'm glad i have a journal for it. it all blends together in my mind. transition, COVID, Trump's invasion of Portland, the slow collapse of my marriage. looking at my journal i talk about there being what i termed at the time a "phony war". it was serious and not at the same time. there were all these random product shortages. everything seemed like a harbinger to me then. it seemed like everything was going to fall apart. so much of a sense of personal disappointment. i'd just socially transitioned a little over three months before, i was just on HRT. after a lifetime of isolating, of avoiding people, i wanted to get _out_, i wanted to be _social_, i wanted to be _me_. i wanted people to see who i really was. for a lot of people, covid isolation allowed them... to see who they really were, without being judged by other people. it helped a lot of people to transition. the wave of COVID transitions, i think of that as a new generation, a separate generation. i felt differently.

looking back i see what i remember. a lot of fear. a lot of panic. when the smog hit that august i pretty much lost it completely. i think i quit ilx at some point because i couldn't handle communicating with other people like that.

All I did was practice viola, play video games, cook my way through Marcella Hazan and drink too much every night. It was a weird year. I didn't want to reach out to friends over text or call them because I had nothing to talk about, nothing was happening, which was weird.

I remember the 4th Feb 2020, my son's 18th birthday and the last time I travelled on a train and also the last time I visited a public swimming pool. iirc it was a few days after the first UK cases and I was nervy + pulling my t-shirt over my mouth on the train and my son was getting annoyed with me and pulling it back down, he does the same if I pull it over my face when he does a disgusting fart in my proximity! I was convinced my mum and stepdad would soon contract it because he goes in Wetherspoons and casinos every evening and she was dismissing it as nothing to worry about when I told her to try and minimise the time she spends in supermarkets and shops. As it turned out neither of them or myself have ever contracted it yet.

What sticks in my memory is about a week before lockdown and buying milk and bread was a struggle, walking past this 50-something bloke with a bag of clinking bottles that looked like a random hodgepodge of just any booze that was left on the shelf. And he had a really grave look on his face and said good luck to you, lad.

And more ominously I was nervously queueing in the Co-op, and it was panic buying season. There was a very scared looking woman in front of me who was the only mask wearing person in the shop and she had half a dozen bottles of white wine in her basket. In front of her was a loudmouthed high-viz bloke having some banter with the tiller about how he was an essential worker and it wasn't right there was no milk or bread left for him. Tiller replied, you only water daffodils in the park, what's so essential about that m8. Then the whole queue went momentarily frozen when he said: no the council have moved me from Parks, they want me to dig graves now.

wow, I just went momentarily frozen...

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

I was in a pretty bad place emotionally/mentally in the late twenty-teens, so when covid came along I thought "nice, I don't have the guts to kill myself, so maybe this'll do the job for me." I would say as much and pass it off as a joke -- "if god wants me, he/she/it can have me, lol" -- but I wasn't really joking. Still, I masked up and behaved myself because I didn't want to risk anyone else's life, just my own. I'd worked from home since late 2001 and had always done the shopping, so no changes there.

Some friends who had put plans in motion in December 2019 to open a restaurant/bar kept plowing ahead even with covid. They had been at the parties where I'd tended bar over the previous three years, thought I knew my stuff, and offered me the job to tend bar, build its cocktail program, order booze, be de facto bar manager, etc. I jumped at the chance -- my freelance dayjob wasn't keeping me busy enough and I was spending weeks at a time in my own head, stewing over my grievances at my family and at the world. Here was a chance to get out of the house, make drinks and hone a new craft, and maybe catch the rona and die, or at least see if the world cared if I got sick. Yes yes, hugely self-pitying.

Meanwhile, my mother, who had always been fiercely independent and proud about being able to take care of herself, had finally moved to an assisted living facility in early 2019 after an accumulation of health problems. She was furious at her body's breakdown -- it was no consolation to her that it happens to everyone. Covid was the last straw. She still had her car and could come and go as she pleased, and she found a lot of errands to run and never seemed to be able to remember to take a mask with her. She finally managed to chase down and catch covid in August 2020, passing away after six days. She went to the local ER on day 2 of symptoms and I stayed with her while she saw the doctor. Sometime during the week I caught it, probably from my mother during that ER visit. Roughly 9-day case, very mild, symptoms arriving the day of her funeral.

When it didn't kill me, I quit joking about it. I quit masking fall 2020. I'm mostly, not 100%, in a better headspace now. Mom was the linchpin of the family, and I haven't seen much of my brother or sister in the last couple of years since we sold Mom's house. They just fought all the time with me in the middle, so that's fine.

That’s heavy stuff, WmC. Glad you are doing somewhat better now.

My mom had gone to an assisted living facility in December '19, but it quickly became obvious to everyone that she needed to be in the memory care wing. They moved her to MC the weekend in March that everything shut down, and we could only talk to her through her window for a few months. She was somewhat cognizant of the fact that there was a virus going around and that that was the reason we couldn't come inside. After a few months we were allowed to sit 6' apart from her at a table at an outside patio, then when the weather turned in Fall '20 they set up a vacant room inside of MC as a visitation room, still maintaining 6' distance. We didn't get back into her room until April '21. I had some issues with the facility management but they did a fantastic job keeping everyone safe through COVID; no COVID fatalities in either AL or MC.

My son came home for Spring break around March 5th; was supposed to go back on the 14th but by that time it was apparent things were not going to reopen. We drove from Cleveland to St. Louis to move him out of his dorm room and drove back the next day. I remember stopping at a Chipotle near Columbus, the three of us walking into the restaurant, and getting yelled at by the doorkeeper for standing too close to each other. . .

The night of the 15th I turned on a Liga MX match, knowing it was the last live sports I would see on TV for awhile. IIRC they had closed the game to fans and it was very weird to see a stadium (especially the Azteca) empty of fans while a match was going on. Turns out that would be a common sight soon.

Both gyms I belonged to closed and I remember a lot of long walks in the Metroparks that spring/summer trying to stay in shape -- didn't work, I had gained about 15 pounds by fall '20.

I was very fortunate not to lose any close relatives or friends. What I remember most during the first months was. . .I wouldn't say confusion, but just a feeling of not knowing how things were going to unfold. My work was pharma/life sciences-adjacent, and I knew that every day, we would get a bit more information about what was happening, and that there were lots of smart people working on understanding the problem and finding ways to slow the transmission and mitigate the damage.

a year before covid, my partner had an accident that affected their mobility and left them housebound for several months for physical reasons. While they stayed at home recovering, I worked 5 days a week, out the house from 7am til 7pm. Their mental health suffered as a result of the isolation - we had visitors but not many, and he didn't work or get to do the things that brought him joy, like gigs and clubs. So by the time lockdown arrived, they had been "socially distanced" for a year already, or near enough.

In Feb 2020 we travelled from Glasgow to Manchester with two pals for a Carly Rae Jepsen concert and a night on Canal St. It was a disaster - he did well with the travel and the concert, but the night of clubbing was disastrous and he committed an act of serious self-harm that let us know he just wasn't ready for this kind of activity.

We got back to Glasgow and I was ill. At first I thought it was a hangover, then it got insanely difficult. Fever and sweats, and a constant cough I couldn't get rid of. I took a week off work. People were joking that I had covid because in February it was still a mysterious disease on the other side of the world, but with hindsight I think I might have had it then. I went back to work but was already using a bottle of hand sanitiser a week because I had to touch stock, and also customers due to the nature of what my shop sold. I remember joking with a customer that I hadn't heard of covid because I had been on a boat trip to Italy and missed the news, and us all laughing because we had no idea how serious or real it was going to be, which feels grotesque now.

March arrived and it became increasingly real. I went to a Tove Lo concert on the Monday, and I remember a lad chatting/flirting with me at the sinks as we washed our hands for twenty seconds while singing a So Solid Crew verse (?!?). Work was utterly pointless - our shop took £2000 a day normally and that week we couldn't even put £100 in the till in a day. On the Wednesday we got told by Head Office to prepare a sale and be ready to launch it on the Thursday. I remember moaning to a colleague how irresponsible it was to attempt to drive footfall to the high street at a time that we were being discouraged from going out. It was moot: by Thursday the shop was closed for lockdown, a day earlier than the rest of the country. I went in to do things like turn off the fridge and throw out any food, and put dust covers down, and the person I went in with and I joked about how good a three week holiday would be. It turned into five months.

Five months at home with my partner and their mental health struggles. Did lockdown exacerbate them? Perhaps. But I doubt they would have been going out otherwise. They don't go out now without me, a pal or their mother. I was there to talk to them, comfort them, entertain them, watch nonsense on Netflix and Youtube with them. When they picked up the scissors or the knives I was there to take them back out their hands. It wasn't easy, but it was better than what might have happened when I wasn't there. They started having seizures during this time. The first time was terrifying. I called NHS 24 but of course the lines were so busy and the resources so limited that I was basically told, if he doesn't die then good luck to you. Those seizures have become a part of life for us now - at least one a day - but it was months before we could get the necessary MRI scans and blood tests to confirm they weren't part of something scarier like a brain tumour.

I also had a very creative five months. I had bought a DJ controller but was scared to set it up and practice because I had a fear I would find it so difficult and hard to use that it would turn out to be a waste of money. I got better with it, and now a few years later I'm at a point where I'm playing out in public. I also recorded my own music and put it online and made a not-insignificant (to me, at least) amount of money from it. I haven't made any new original music in a while, and in the four years since lockdown ended I've made as many minutes of music as I did during lockdown itself, if not less.

I realised I was going to get heavy during lockdown. I don't enjoy exercise and I never do it, and for all the yoga videos and Joe Wicks content we saw it just wasn't for me. All I did was run up and down stairs at work all day, which was enough to keep my waistline under 36" it seems. I wear elastic waistbands now and I'm probably never going to lose the weight. Pre-lockdown my diet was terrible: nuggets, wedges, dippers and bites. I decided to learn to cook better foods, figuring that if I was going to get fat then I was going to do it in style. I made fancy decadent dinners. 18 months later I got a kidney stone and was told to avoid foods like beetroot, chickpeas, lentils and rhubarb - all the food I had become confident in using and had been making nice meals with.

My first niece was born in the first week of lockdown. We met her for the first time in the garden from 10 ft away, months later. My brother and his family live 15 miles away so we were never going to be close due to simple geography and the fact neither of us drive, but I wonder if lockdown has exacerbated that. My brother and his partner doubt they'll have another child, because they don't think it would be fair that they got to spend so much time with their kid and they wouldn't be able to do it again.

I remember being close to telling people to just fuck off in the supermarket. The first trip to ASDA was gruelling. We had to queue for nearly an hour to get in, but once we got in people seemed to just give up on social distancing. I also remember queueing to get into the corner shop and having to hear some homophobic "banter" from a lad behind me. My tolerance for other people's nonsense dried up very quickly. When I saw people having street parties for Royal Family nonsense while I thought of people dying alone in hospitals I felt - feel - so sick and angry and I find it hard to believe this country was ever able to recover from what felt like such an obvious schism in attitudes.

While on furlough I was on 80% of my wage, and I wasn't exactly earning good money before that. I worried about costs. But it turns out, being at home meant not spending money. Pre-lockdown I would cheer myself daily with a trip to Greggs, once weekly to McDonalds or similar, and I would walk past other shops and drop money if the sales were on. It changed my spending habits substantially.

When the time to go back to work came, I realised I would be responsible for the safety of my team. I would be the person who would have to get into arguments about why we couldn't let ten people into the store, why they had to wear masks, why they would have to be taking hand sanitiser before they came in. I'm not naturally a confrontational or confident person in many ways, but I was going to have to be to ensure my personal safety and that of my staff. So I spent a weekend practicing saying in the mirror "I need you to do this" until it sounded natural, confident, forceful and expected. I didn't have too many difficult encounters but I was prepared in a way I wouldn't have been before, and going forward I now practice and learn scripts for difficult situations I can predict, and feel much more able to say "no" in a way I wouldn't have in 2019.

tl;dr - lockdown was a land of many contrasts

when it was safe to go clubbing again, a group of us bought tickets for a weekend at a place in Glasgow where local heroes Melting Pot and Optimo were playing. The Saturday was the day for Melting Pot who play around the theme of disco, and it was a little disappointing - they usually play quite eclectic and interesting but the vibe was very School Disco and I heard "I'm Every Woman" three times in the space of four hours. But they also played this, which I had previously enjoyed but never really felt was top tier - but on a sunkissed balcony after months of staying in, sounded absolutely glorious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syPi_HXY1e0

I flew back from a holiday in Prague to Bournemouth on 10 February 2020, and there were signs at the airport about the outbreak of novel coronavirus in the Far East. I assumed it would go the way of avian flu or the heatwaves in France, e.g. it would kill 20,000 people who were already poorly, but otherwise life would go on. On 14 March 2020 I went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the BFI Southbank, and I remember thinking "is this a good idea". They closed the cinemas seven days later:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/17/cinemas-across-the-uk-to-shut-in-response-to-coronavirus-odeon-cineworld

The roads were really quiet for a short while, so in May I spent a small fortune on a Brompton, thus contributing to the great bicycle boom of 2020:
https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/the-great-bicycle-boom-of-2020.html

I lived near a town that was at the time popular with tourists from the Far East, and pre-COVID they often wore facemasks, which was disconcerting, because pre-COVID facemasks came across as an overreaction. Admittedly my home town has a distinctive odour, but for the most part it's not unsanitary. However those tourists obviously knew their onions, because China's official death toll was something like 80,000 for the entire COVID wave (roughly the same as Japan, slightly more than the Philippines and Malaysia), so they must have known what they were doing. I was also struck with the depressing thought that COVID wasn't going to be like a war, with a definite end. It was just going to chunter on, and then slowly fade away, but never vanish entirely, like the ending of The Birds.

I visited Hong Kong in October 2019, because I was briefly flush with cash. It was £450 to fly from London to Hong Kong and back. I remember thinking "this can't last" and "what kind of world do we live in where a flight half-way across the globe is £450" and "it's a good job I'm a documentarian and traveller, not a tourist, otherwise people might blame me for climate change". It feels like a completely different world now.

Back in 2020 the whole travel blogger "van life" thing was just becoming established (Itchy Boots, the motorcyclist, ended up being stuck in Peru) and I remember laughing heartily to myself at the thought of these well-scrubbed yuppies suddenly having to pay for accommodation instead of demanding free rooms etc, but also not laughing because they started off richer than me and would presumably continue to be richer than me. I imagine it also affected people for whom international travel is a power signifier, such as Timothy Garton Ash and Thomas Friedman etc.

The big tragedy is that after getting thumping majorities and pretty much vanquishing the lefties in 2016 and 2019 it seemed as if we had finally won, and had been given a guaranteed lock on the subsequent elections. COVID was a golden opportunity to humanise the right wing and show empathy with ordinary people. But the Tories and the Republicans shot themselves in the foot... feet... foots and essentially wrecked their own chances of election victory against weak opposition. If Donald Trump had simply gone into hibernation throughout the pandemic - if he had gorged himself on cheeseburgers and gone to sleep in a cave - he would have won the 2020 election by a landslide, and now he would be at the end of his second term, with no chance of ever being President again. It would all be over.

And if Boris Johnson had used his brush with COVID as a learning experience he would still be Prime Minister and would presumably have called a general election last year, which he would have won handily. Instead we have this mess. This mess.

Wildlife who were dependent on humanity’s leavings - I’m thinking of restaurant dumpsters and such - had a tough time during the early pandemic. My neighborhood had, suddenly, mouse and rat problems.

One of my enduring memories of this time was discovering a squirrel on top of my plastic garbage bin, gnawing a hole through the lid. We were separated by a few feet, and I gawped at the squirrel doing this, wherein the squirrel glared back and then took another bite of the lid, as if to say, “What? What? You got something to say? You gonna step to me?”

Clearing out my drafts and found this shopping list from March 16, 2020

List for hanging out at home

potatoes
fried shallots
Spring onions
Minced beef extra
bread
Chicken carcass
white pepper
anise seeds, cardamon, cloves, cinammon
coconut milk
Pasta
sausages
Toilet paper and kitchen roll
Garlic
eggs
Sanitising products
Wipes/dettol
Chocolate
More instant ramen
Chips
Pancake mix
Candles?
Razor
Shower wash
Alcohol

Came into the San Francisco office today, on a lark. I've been in for a couple meetings and lunches, but this is the first time in four years that I've done the morning commute, on the BART train. It's kind of surreal - a trip I've made literally thousands of times, so it's very familiar, but it's also like something from a dream.. the alleys I used to walk, the sandwich shops.. it all seems so weird and distant, like from a different life

(There's like four other people here, all dudes.. they're having lunch together)

That's a moving post, boxedjoy.

good thread.
so much fades away - my kid's school closing while he was learning to read, Zoom for everything, feeling guilty for online supermarket deliveries every fortnight - but the death of our friend from Covid that first winter is what I still think of at least weekly.

Like others I still felt/feel very confined to staying near home even when I didn't have to - combination of young kids (so out of the habit) and covid. Flew abroad for the first time last summer.

I quite like that you can wear a mask and not feel too weird about it. I did (on trains/enclosed spaces) last winter before visiting relatives having chemo just to reduce the chance of catching anything I could pass on.

also one of the first people to die in England, as far as was reported, was in the next town, despite the SW having relatively low prevalence throughout, so I guess I was on high alert from the start.

An older friend and his wife died of Covid in, I believe, late 2020 or early 2021. A poet who was kind of the ringleader of the poetry group I belonged to in Pennsylvania. There was no funeral for obvious reasons - it hurts to think about this, but as someone noted upthread, it also feels unreal, like something that happened into a dream someone else is relating to me.

you could only get covid tests in the test centre. which for us was an airport. driving through silent roads to go to an essentially disused airport with disaster relief tents, barriers and ominous signs everywhere really was surreal.

Feel very fortunate that I didn't have anyone close to me due to COVID, but some family members that died during early peaks. Still get really sad when I remember my aunt telling me how sad and surreal it was to be at his funeral, outdoors at a tiny church in Wisconsin, attended by only a handful of people. Contrasted with his brother, my other uncle, who passed away in 2018 and his funeral was a really well attended funeral that led to a surprisingly joyful wake and family reunion.

Things like that stick with me, the other, quieter losses and shadows that crept through the pandemic.

Came into the San Francisco office today, on a lark. I've been in for a couple meetings and lunches, but this is the first time in four years that I've done the morning commute, on the BART train. It's kind of surreal - a trip I've made literally thousands of times, so it's very familiar, but it's also like something from a dream.. the alleys I used to walk, the sandwich shops.. it all seems so weird and distant, like from a different life

I could definitely see that. It was a little weird to essentially be within about ten blocks for almost a year where I was at, though at the same time there were still always people out and about when I was, if in lesser numbers, and so I mentally adjusted. But it wasn't Market or anywhere where all the big office buildings are so basically everything's felt like more of a continuum. (Being away from the hospital area itself for over three years was, I think, very helpful too -- aside from going in for vaccinations and one or two quick checks on piled up mail, I missed both the worst of the scourge in general when the numbers of patients in care was overwhelming as well as the construction of a new building right near mine, which would have made every day really noisy and crazy. I have to salute everyone who was not so fortunate as I when it came from working from home.)

(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

I think I was pessimistic from the start because loads of parents refused to believe that "they" would close the schools. but I thought it was crazy to keep them open. and when it happened I could see that without a vaccine there was no "way out" of it so we'd probably be spending Christmas with covid hanging over us.

remember when Boris made everyone go back to school that one day after Christmas then changed his mind?

Some other memories, some of which seem absurd in retrospect:
- Washing beer cans in the sink that I had ordered online -- I got some variety pack from a beer distribution company and a lot of it turned out to be unsold stuff from pride, so I spent a lot of my summer drinking stuff called, like "Bob's Super Gay IPA" or whatever
- wiping down mail
- ordering toilet paper from a hotel distributor because I couldn't find any, and having a truck show up in front of the house
- ordering food from Baldor when it first converted from restaurant distribution to groceries and having weird glitches, like the time they accidentally sent us 48 ears of corn. Ate corn every day and still couldn't finish it.
- crossing the street when we saw people
- a haunting feeling almost like we had left earth and lived in a terraforming colony on Mars
- hearing a fox mating at night for the first time and briefly panicking that a child was being attacked
- the kids named the groundhogs "Geronimal" and "Sheila." Geronimal is still one of my favorite names of all time.

I found coming into the city today strangely moving and kinda sad... I was still with my girlfriend in early 2020 (we split a little over a year ago) and just walking around this neighborhood and the Safeway put me right back there, in happier times. I would get on the CalTrain to go to her place in Redwood City, often stopping to get a bottle of wine or something. It's physically all still here, but that world is gone forever :-(

I'd started a new job on the week of 9th March, two weeks later we were told to work from home. So for the next year I'd had hardly any hands on training, the company wasn't set up for home working at all. A bit of a mess.

I've got two good friends who had the covid-era coincide with (I suspect) maybe mild cases of mid-life crisis, the result being they're tons of fun to be around, because they say yes to almost anything, are almost always free to grab a beer, and so on. Between the general state of things and seeing so much change and pain and whatnot, they just cut right through the bullshit and try to make the best of every day. I love that, not least because they temper my own tendency toward despondency. But I also have a couple of other (still!) good friends that I barely see. Between work from home and their caution and various other life changes, they just never recovered, socially, and don't get out much, largely remaining stationed in place, not as lonely shut ins or anything, just ... stationary. They seem content, but they also seem tired.

I admit I am constructing my own narrative, but both sets of friends are reminders, in their own way, of The Covid Years.

Yeah, I emerged fleeter of foot than ever -- I go out, sometimes on weekday nights, more than ever -- but also even more regimented.

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"

― frogbs

The idea of "before time" is so interesting to me... I mostly use it to refer to my pre-transition life, but it does have a whiff of pre-COVID life as well. Because they were so close together.

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:

― Marten Broadcloak, mild-mannered GOP congressman (Raymond Cummings)

I haven't. COVID was... when I stopped fighting and started surviving. When 2016 happened, it shattered me, and I said, OK, here's what I have to do to survive, and I did more than that, in retrospect. I did more than that. I went through a lot of shit, I grew, I changed, I got stronger, and when I transitioned, it was... there was some of that hope. There was, hey, even if I don't make it, maybe I can help make a better world. Maybe a better world can remember me. It wasn't so much a sense of "this will all blow over" but that "things need to change, and we will come together, we will make that change, and we will do it soon because how much longer can this go on?"

And I still don't have the answer to that. I have a hard time believing that the change that will come will be... well, it'll be a hard change. It's like someone said upthread... there are people, a lot more people than there were, I think, who do believe in doing the right thing, who do _try_ to do the right thing. Even if we're all powerless right now, we're here, we exist, and that matters.

But a better world? No. I don't believe I'll see a better world in my lifetime. I'm working to find joy and meaning such as I can in this life, but COVID, the way that went down, the way people are _still_ treating it... I've made my peace with it. I'm pretty sure that this is as good as things get for me. That from here on out, things will keep getting worse and worse until I die, whenever that is.

So I try to keep my world pretty small. And I don't talk about it much, about how I feel, because I don't want to depress people. Because the only thing that's going to change my mind is evidence. And there is... there is evidence, in the small things, in the margins, that someday things will be better. Someday there will be a better world. It's not something I can personally imagine. You know, they say "If you dream it, you can do it", and I don't really have dreams. I have nightmares.

My mother, back in Ireland, contracted COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) sometime around 2014 - as you might know, it's less of a disease and more a certificate of "Yep, your lungs sure are fucked". She got it via double pneumonia, from forcing down a mixture that she was supposed to drink before a join bowel operation / full hysterectomy. In the end she never had the operation - they wouldn't put her under until her lungs were improved, and they never got there. She was also, bless her, bad at managing it - she had a oxygen mask for use at night, but she'd been convinced that it wasn't wise to vape (which she'd switched to a few years before from a lifetime of smoking) with the mask on her, so she would set it up, take it off for one last vape, and then fall asleep with it off. She'd also been curled over to one side from a ministroke earlier that year, which has not done the lung on that side any favours.

Which is all to say then when it became clear that Covid was happening, and would soon be happening everywhere, I thought "Oh okay, that is what will do it". It'd been a long-standing joke between the kids that it wasn't clear that anything could kill her, but this seemed custom-made? I'm glad I got back over to see her at the start of February 2020 when this was more "in the background in the first scene of a zombie movie" levels. And also that since the pneumonia, I'd been ringing her more or less daily for a chat.

The lockdown didn't make much of a difference to her, she lived in a granny flat attached to my sister's house, and basically only ever saw her and her family. She kept getting ill with various things and going into hospital, which obviously wasn't great, but it'd kind of already been a thing.

On Christmas Day 2020, she had to go into hospital again (kidney stuff, I think, it was often kidney stuff that year) - my sister was more annoyed about the timing than concerned. And she was back out in a week, but only out for a week and then she was back out in a week but only out for a week... The second time that she'd been in, my sister said that the lung x-rays that they'd taken had the ground-glass consistency of Covid, but she'd kept testing negative. When she went in the third time, she tested positive for Covid, and went downhill from there. A few days later that sister (that was the one person she could see under Covid rules) asked me to record something to say to her, just a message in lieu of talking to her, as that would be too much of a strain. On the day that they said that the only next step up would be a ventilator, but that they would be prioritising other patients for the ventilators, my sister went in to see her in the morning, and realised that the end was near, but had to go back home because it was her daughter's birthday. And while she was there, she felt worse, and tested, and so she spent the next week recovering from Covid (while the rest of her family also came down with it); my mother died that night.

Grim thoughts that I can't recommend: It occasionally returns to me, the idea of her waking up alone and confused, and wondering what is going on, and finally realising that what is going on is that she's dying, and that what will happen next is a few more rounds of the same confusion and realization

Being the one who lived far away and didn't see her nearly so often weighed a lot on me then - she'd become the person I tell my days into stories for, and the loss of that became bewildering. The securitycam-level footage of the funeral didn't help, either. I'm glad though, that I did have 2020 to come to terms with the chance that it was going to happen, and to continue to chat to her - there were no matters outstanding by the end, only love.

I'm really sorry - that must have been beyond awful. I do think that in all the (deserved! ) bad memories of covid loads of people forget how many loved ones were in those headline figures.

I keep thinking how everything seemed very serious but also farcical

I spent the first few days of March out of town for what would be my last couple concerts for some time. That was March 2-3 2020, and I felt like it was mostly fine for the first evening. The second, the fear set in a little bit and I was kind of consciously standing away from the rest of the concertgoers a little bit.

That weekend, I went on a shopping spree and bought a bunch of essentials at Costco and the like. Friday, March 16, I worked from home, but didn't make a big deal out of it even though I suspected something was coming. The following Monday, we were told not to come into the office. That week, we were allowed in to get as many things as we'd need to work from home for the immediate future.

I was crossing off the days on a calendar on my refrigerator, along with cataloguing the days when I'd ventured out for shopping and supplies. Some vague idea of knowing when I'd been around people in case I needed to quarantine or isolate. My fridge ended up dying several months into the pandemic, and when I replaced it with a smaller fridge I bought from a friend, I quit doing the calendar thing because it didn't fit on the new one.

I remember attending a protest in early June, masked and outdoors, and one of the organizers urging us not to huddle up too closely because "there's covid out here on these streets"

Since I was working from home and my hours were increasingly flexible as the teams I was working were were pretty geographically diverse, I started doing all my shopping during times that'd be less busy, like a Tuesday afternoon. Stores were limiting the number of people and requiring masks, but I seldom encountered a line at that time. One day at Costco, I turned down an aisle only to see a woman I estimated to be in her 50s wearing a Guy Fawkes-style mask. A lot of crazies were coming out of the woodwork by that point. I mumbled "nope" and turned back to avoid having to pass her.

The midwestern derecho went through in August 2020 and ended up knocking out my house's electricity for several days. A bunch of neighbors were wandering around helping to clear out tree branches and debris. I was a little nervous, but it was cleanup that needed to be done and we were all looking for a reason to do something. I worked from a friend's vacated apartment that week, as she'd moved the prior week halfway across the state to be closer to family. My coworkers joked at me about the echo after I'd told them there wasn't and furniture in the room.

I don't my friend actually got together that often with her siblings, as her sister's family was being pretty cautious and her brother's new wife decided she'd had enough by mid-summer and started throwing caution to the wind. Her brother died of covid in November.

My parents retired at the end of 2019 and this was less than ideal, all things considered. Somehow they managed to not drive each other insane, and they would drop by on occasion to plant some decorative things in my backyard and do a little landscaping while I was working from home. We'd sit outside and have some lunch during my breaks.

My manager of the time quit at the beginning of 2021 and, paradoxically, all of the recommendations my other coworkers had resisted that we'd been pushing for years took off after he was gone. I think, professionally, 2021 might have been my favorite year of my career.

had to look up the date - it was March 5th, 2020 when a buddy and I drove to Milwaukee to see They Might be Giants. I thought this was gonna be another bird flu type thing, as evidenced by the fact that the only people panicking about it were the idiot conservatives I still had on Facebook, who were wrong about everything. but that week it really did feel like something was up, it came up more and more in conversation, and by the time of the show we were like "is it really smart to do this?" and realizing that well, this might be the last thing we do for a while. John Flansburgh kept making jokes about it, saying stuff like "this uh might be our last show", which drew a lot of nervous laughter. idk how to explain it but there was this sense of foreboding in the air. you could feel it.

a week or so later I think I dropped $300 at a grocery store. it took me like 20 minutes at the self-checkout to finish. they were out of so many things, I was buying brands of cereal I'd never even heard of before. strange times.

Foreboding is right. The first case in Oregon was reported in late February and it had spread at a nursing home outside Seattle causing death and chaos, so we were already very cognizant of covid's coming.

We had reservations to stay at a room at the coast in the first week of March and debated whether it was safe. We decided that we could wipe down all the surfaces with disinfectant and open all the windows on our arrival and make do. When we'd unpacked and made our preparations, we went out for a walk on the beach. Sunset was approaching and the way the sun and clouds looked, with weird rays and bruised coloring was the strangest looking most ominous sky either of us had ever seen.

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.

When we got home from the coast the phone was ringing as we walked in the door. My wife's brother was in the ICU. We grabbed some food, got back in the car and drove to the hospital, but we weren't allowed to enter the ICU area, so we sat in the parking lot and called his wife and waited for news. It wasn't covid, but Gillan-Barre Syndrome. He was in ICU for two weeks and nearly died. Meanwhile, the whole world was shutting down. It was a crazy time.

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.