A Journal of the Pandemic #19

 I was kind of hoping that when I reached the nineteenth installment I would be able to say we were nearing some version of the end. But we are not.

It’s true that COVID-19 doesn’t fill the news anymore. We started reaching for other topics months ago, but the fact is the pandemic is still happening. We’re in a process of undoing measures that were put in place to help contain the spread, and whatever your feelings on those measures, your personal experiences with the virus, now we’re about to see everything in a whole new light.

Someone who used to work at my facility lost her mom to the pandemic recently. It rattled one of my coworkers. It’s actually been rare, given your geological location, to have first-or even secondhand experience with death as part of this thing. Knowing people who’ve gotten sick is one thing, but knowing people who have died from it is another thing entirely. You hear horror stories at certain epicenters about mass casualties and massive piles of bodies...but for the majority of us, that’s not what we’ve experienced. I didn’t work with this woman (at a previous job I ended up making friends with someone who’d been employed there before my time just because he visited frequently to see old coworkers, and he was a nice guy, so it was just natural), but my current colleague was obviously rattled by the news. We tend to limit ourselves either to our own experiences or blindly accept those of others. It’s difficult to find some middle ground (as in all things). So to say it’s easy to understand the pandemic just because it’s been inescapable is reductive and unhelpful. 

The reopening process will be more difficult than we might have imagined. My facility is actually actively hiding a diagnosis rather than address it as it might have been months ago. We always post a diagnosis (of anything, such as pinkeye) on the door of the affected room, so everyone is aware. To deliberately avoid doing so now can only mean it was determined, at this stage, that it would be counterproductive to the overall desire to bring operations back to normal. That’s been the big push for the past few months, slowed when numbers in-state started to surge, but never outright halted. We brought back most of the staff (less than a handful remain at home). Paycheck protection measures are ending. 

Based on the initial reactions to the pandemic, which the loudest voices insisted weren’t good enough even then, the assumption would necessarily be that we would handle new cases the same way as the old. The school year has begun. Even if most kids are distance learning, that still leaves a substantial new set of potential cases waiting to develop, as has already been the case. Schools here have been open for a few weeks already. 

If only. If only we had allowed ourselves to make reasoned decisions at the start. If only we had allowed ourselves to calculate what to keep in operation, not based on need alone but on a reasonable assessment of measures that could be employed, distancing possible within a given space. If only we had stopped for a moment to think about how this thing spreads in real terms. If only we had considered, in real terms, how our measures provoked reactions that led to more spreading rather than less. If only we had taken the time to do all this in April. 

It’s not a measure of how right you are to condemn someone for how they react. A reaction is a response, not a decision. You give someone a situation that totally disrupts everything they previously took for granted, and the result will be difficult to contain. You can be wrong by being too right. (This is an absolute proven by the fact that the reverse cannot be true: You can’t be right by being too wrong.)

I wish this were something that people could understand. But for some people, being righteous means the inability to question their thought process. It’s not merely a religious thing. You can be righteously wrong and have no concept of faith at all, except in your own misguided convictions.

Now we struggle to piece things back together. There will be missing pieces for a long time to come.