A Journal of the Pandemic #34

This month marks three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it was widely experienced, that swept the entire globe and triggered a series of lockdowns and other measures that severely impacted normal life.  It's the first anniversary where those restrictions are all but completely over.  People still get sick.  People are no doubt still dying.  Some people are still wearing masks.

The mask thing really gets me.  It's become normal for some people, just an instinct they have when someone gets sick near them.  Or maybe it's when they've become aware of a specific, COVID-related infection.  I don't know.  I'm not really asking anymore.  Some people still drive in their cars, by themselves, with masks on.  Which never made sense in the first place, but that's humanity for you.

The state of the world's economy is still attempting to process all of this.  In the news recently are banking institutions running into considerable problems.  Are we seeing the end or only the very beginning of all that?  I would assume the latter.

I still consider the panic at the start of this to have been wildly misjudged.  But then, panic always is.  It's kind of the definition.  There will be the diehards who will never even consider reconsidering the initial response, the call for dire panic.  For three years I've watched this play out around me like everyone else.  No one in my immediate community of experience died from COVID-19.  That's three years.  Not one death.  No one from the workplace, not one direct family member.  There were a few very older members of the extended family.  

Of course it still infects people.  Because of the panic, there was an equally strong push, eventually, not to give in to the same measures.  The measures curtailed.  And then there were really no measures at all.  

Three years ago, things were disrupted that began a chain of events that cannot be undone.  In a little over a month, I'll see my niece in person for the first time since before the pandemic.  I'll meet her brother and sister for the first time, both born since the pandemic began.  Three years is a long time, even longer for a young child.  I've now basically missed half her life.  Phone conversations ended up not being nearly good enough.  I'm not a real part of her life.  There are other factors involved, sure, but for three years, I was not free to make decisions as I liked.  There were plenty of people who took to traveling as they pleased almost immediately.  As long as they said the right things, wore the right headgear, took the right medicine, no one batted an eye.  Tell me how that squares with the urgency, the panic that so many people pushed as the narrative we were supposed to accept three years ago?  

Some people are quick to pick up the thread left by others.  They're quick to condemn, to judge, to convict, and they call this justice.  They're perfectly happy to suffer the consequences, and the next minute they'll complain and say it's really the fault of the other guy, because they didn't do something, they didn't do enough.  Listen, the panic was a right and proper panic button.  It did what it was supposed to do.  Three years later we're really only beginning to pick up the pieces.  We still have no idea what this unprecedented event in human history hath wrought.  Never before has humanity united in such fashion.  Never before have we agreed to such measures.

Well, I'm sure there are people happy with all this.  And a very good day to them, too.