Learning to live out in the world as COVID continues to rise
Maybe it’s time for the word “normal” to be retired from the English language.
For months we talked about returning to normal after the pandemic. But there does not seem to be an “after” to COVID, which keeps churning out more variants. So maybe there’s no “normal” either.
And even if there were, the disparities in racial and income inequality exacerbated by the pandemic make it plain that we don’t want to return to the status quo ante. If that’s what “normal” is, we want no part of it.
Right now we are all just exhausted by two years of pandemic precaution, division, and isolation.
Many people are already thinking about the pandemic in the past tense, and assessing how it changed their lives. One friend says she was grateful that the lockdown gave her permission to slow down, and now she’s not sure she wants to speed up again. She was happy to have quiet and solitude; now she’s thinking about how to hang on to some of it.
For another person, the locked-down life of Zoom meetings and working at home revealed just how toxic his work environment was. He quit. Now he’s struggling to complete a course of study and get credentialed to start a new career. He was briefly homeless, and seems shaken by the experience. He’s struggling to get his self-confidence back and start getting a paycheck again.
Almost everyone’s life was upended in one way or another by the long isolation of the pandemic, even if we didn’t change jobs or face economic hardship. We’re struggling to get our footing, and trying to rebuild social lives and extended family relationships.
The hardest part is squaring our feelings with the fact that our county is in the red zone again. The Thurston County Public Health and Social Services COVID dashboard showed 712 new cases in the week of July 14-22. No one from our county died that week, but 30 were hospitalized, and a lot of people were at home being miserable.
The risk of lingering symptoms — the dreaded long COVID — is about 15 percent for people who are not hospitalized, and about 30 percent for those who are. Among the possible long COVID symptoms are life-altering changes in brain function and lung and heart damage.
Given the still scary possible consequences of infection, you might think we would all be wearing masks more than we are. But most people seem to be prioritizing mental health — the craving for freedom from even thinking about the pandemic — over physical health and safety. Few people are wearing masks even in the grocery store. More are going to indoor gatherings, restaurants and bars unmasked.
Still, even some of the most masked-up, careful people are getting infected. Suddenly many of us know more people who have gotten sick in the last two or three months than in the previous two years.
No one wants to live any longer with the feeling of being in constant crisis and danger. That was exhausting and traumatic. But now, in this murky space between safety and sickness, we have a lingering, low-grade anxiety we are learning to live with. We can’t deny the anxiety, or the existence of COVID variants. The difference between “pandemic” and “endemic” is just one syllable.
We can count our blessings though: We seem to be past having hate-filled debates about masks and vaccination. No one talks about COVID as a hoax anymore. We have more effective treatments and less likelihood of hospitalization and death. And we’ve learned a lot more about ourselves and the society we live in — lessons we can hold onto and use to build a more civil, compassionate, and just society and a stronger public health system.
That would be the only suitable memorial for the 1.02 million Americans who have died from COVID, and the 400 per day we’re still losing.
This story was originally published July 31, 2022 at 5:30 AM.