Ready for Somber Commemorations

The nation is on the cusp of many covidversaries.

It was one year ago that rumors of a rampant virus coalesced into bitter reality. News probably would have landed earlier if not for a concerted effort at the federal level to obfuscate and hide facts. Protecting the oh-so-precious economy and the president’s chances for re-election took precedence; giving certain movers and shakers an opportunity to dump their stocks before a financial implosion was just lagniappe.

Be that as it may, we are approaching the 12-month marker for many firsts in the coming weeks and months. Just because they aren’t happy milestones doesn’t mean we won’t remember.

For me, the pandemic became a reality last March when schools closed and teachers, students and administrators started the shift to online education. I can remember cheers among some students with that initial announcement because many welcomed a week or two off, like a supersized spring break.

Nobody realized it was the end of in-person learning for the rest of the school year and the start of societal changes that continue to impact us all today.

Whether your jam was sports, shopping, live concerts, visiting with family outside your own home or all of the above, your way of life was going to be upended — a true cancel culture, borne of necessity, not politics.

The reactions across the area and nation made us think differently about the concept of sacrifice. Namely, that some Americans were willing to make concessions and others weren’t.

The first indication was the inability of so many people to accept the evidence of science, including the reality that epidemiologists and virologists didn’t — and don’t — have all the answers.

Initial recommendations that masking was not necessary were soon replaced with an urgent plea to wear them. Yet many people clung to that original precept, refusing to acknowledge new evidence and advisories, even when researchers demonstrated that each person’s mask did as much to protect others as it did to protect oneself.

This should have been enough to mollify the so-called freedom fighters, including our then president, who continued to characterize mask wearing as a personal decision devoid of repercussions for others — I’ll do me, you do you — and as a sign of timidity and weakness.

Asymptomatic spread was a concept these folks just couldn’t or wouldn’t accept, not if it meant deviating one iota from their way of life. Instead, they hid behind a flimsy wall of rationalizations, arguing to shield only the weak and elderly and practicing confirmation bias by amplifying the voices of a minuscule number of healthcare professionals who argued against masks and general quarantines.

What many of these contrarians see as science’s greatest failure — its ability to change in the face of additional evidence — is actually the discipline’s greatest strength. Hypotheses about the coronavirus are not religious truths, ancient and immutable, but are modified to account for better data.

So it’s not a contradiction to go from no-mask to mask-wearing recommendations, or to refine risk factors for transmission or for returning to work, school and recreation, even today, one year after the pandemic began in earnest.

Of course, the hardest and most tragic covidversaries are the ones families and friends will mark this year and every year hereafter — the loss of so many lives, 517,000-plus and counting. Spouses, parents, children, siblings, coworkers — each person special to so many, snuffed out like a candle with so much light yet to give.

What I fear most during these months of pending covidversaries is the entirely understandable but oh-so-dangerous human inclination to use them as an excuse for saying “no more.” No more delays, no more inconveniences, no more looking out for others at the expense of our own lifestyles and preferences.

I’m hearing this already, even among people who have been patient thus far: Once I have my vaccine, the storyline goes, I can get back to everything I want to do. But it will take time before enough people have been vaccinated to achieve anything close to herd immunity. Normalcy, such as it is, is still months away.

Now that holiday spikes are behind us, it’s easy to be lulled into false security by dwindling infections, to rush back to much-missed pastimes too soon, before we know if vaccinated people can still transmit the virus, before we see how much protection the shots provide against new variants.

Nobody wants to mark a second year of covidversaries in 2022. But neither does anybody want to stack more fatalities on top of those that have come before, not when we are so close to beating this virus for real.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter