A Pandemic Chronology
By Bill Meara
They say time heals all wounds. Time makes you forget the bad stuff. In an effort to remember what really happened, I opened a Word file and started to write down some of the things that did happen to us during the pandemic of 2020-2022.
1918
Early Pandemic February - May 2020
We were in the Dominican Republic in
January 2020, just as the pandemic was getting started. We were on a family trip that included some
beach time, and a visit to Elisa's folks.
It was just after this trip that reports about the virus began to grab
our attention.
On January 22, 2020 newspapers reported that Longfellow Middle School in McLean Virginia (the school that both my kids had attended) had abruptly cancelled the exchange visit of a group of kids from Wuhan, China. The kids were apparently already in the U.S. I remember thinking that this cancellation seemed over-the-top, perhaps the action of over-protective helicopter parents. Of course, I did not know what lay ahead. I didn’t know that very soon much of life in the world would grind to a halt, that people would stop going to work and to school, that most of the planes would stop flying and that a million Americans would be killed.
In February 2020, Elisa went back to Santo Domingo to spend
more time with her folks. Around this
time we started to read reports of what seemed like impossibly draconian
measures restricting movement in Italy.
We had lived in that country for three years and were well familiar with
the Italians' charming disregard for rules and restrictions. "That'll never work!" I
thought.
Elisa returned to the U.S.
on what turned out to be a very important day in U.S. pandemic response:
February 26, 2020. I drove from Northern
Virginia to Baltimore-Washington International airport to pick her up, and I
listened to the now-infamous White House press conference on the pandemic. Even over the radio I could sense Trump
pushing Dr. Fauci aside as Trump absurdly claimed that we -- because of his
supposedly wise leadership -- had the situation totally under control. Trump spoke of case numbers dropping to the
single digits. He was off by a factor of
millions.
It was a stressful
airport pick-up, not only because of the absurd statements of Trump, but also
because of the hostile, and racist police attitudes that his presidency had
fostered: After Elisa objected to rude
treatment by a Customs and Border protection officer (the officer had yelled at
her for walking the wrong way in response to some very unclear signs) the
officer retaliated by designating Elisa for "secondary
inspection." Another CBP officer
went through all of Elisa's baggage, examining personal letters and highly
personal medication. He refused to allow
her to call me to let me know what was going on. I was very worried and was in the process of
alerting the Maryland State Police when CBP finally released my wife. This was all another reminder of what life
was like for people of color under the Trump administration.
Things really started to get serious in mid-March 2020. On March 11, Trump staged his clumsy speech
from the Oval Office in which he provoked air travel chaos by announcing that
he was suspending travel between the United States and Europe. When they announced that the basketball season
had been cancelled, I knew that this was getting serious. And the schools closed – in the neighborhood I
crossed paths with the mother of a disabled kid. The kid really depended on school, and the
mother said she hoped the shut-down would only last a couple of weeks. I wasn’t so hopeful.
On March 16, 2020 the federal government sent a card to all
American postal addresses. Even at that
early date, I remember seriously doubting if this was, in fact, Trump’s
plan. And even if it was, I wondered how
long he would adhere to it.
At first, it all seemed quite surreal. In the beginning, we didn't know what to expect. As the storm clouds gathered, we worried about whether highways from the kids' universities might be cut by roadblocks. We noticed that the airplanes that were always a few thousand feet above our house on their way to National Airport were no longer there. We worried whether we might face food shortages -- Billy bought us a big 20-pound bag of rice. There were occasional wonderings about whether we should get a gun (we didn’t).
When business shut-downs were announced, it briefly looked
as if Elisa’s garden design business was going to be put on hold – it seemed
that the subcontractors who installed the gardens she designed would be shut
down. But then they were suddenly
re-opened – someone determined that they were “agricultural enterprises” so
they could continue to operate. With
people essentially stuck in their homes, many began to consider improvements to
their gardens. Ironically 2020 turned out to be a great year for Elisa’s
business. But it was hazardous – early
on, one member of the installation crew got COVID. He survived, but it was
scary. Most of Elisa’s consultation
visits shifted from in-person to Zoom.
I had been volunteering in an English language course for immigrants, but it was starting to look like the course might not be able to continue. Language instruction often involves a lot of "watch what my mouth does when I make this sound" kind of demonstrations, with a large amount of spittle projection. Our students often lived in crowded, multi-family conditions. Our instructors were usually older, and more vulnerable to COVID. The writing was on the wall, but many of our students didn't see it coming. On March 15, 2020, the last day that we would gather in a classroom, one student was truly bewildered as I tried to explain why there would likely be an announcement suspending the course. "But why?" she asked. It was a sad moment. Many more were to come.
We didn't realize it at the time, but the saddest and most impactful announcements came from the universities that our kids were attending. Both were home for Spring Break. Little did any of us know that that break would be much, much longer than expected. Both my kids received text messages from their colleges announcing the immediate suspension of "in-person" classes. They were encouraged not to return to campus. This was especially hard on my son, who was at the time a senior at James Madison University. All that was left of college for him were those two, final, hitherto glorious months with friends on campus. Suddenly, it looked like that wasn't going to happen. And it didn't happen. There wasn't even a real graduation. We all logged in remotely and watched a Zoom version of the ceremony, but it just wasn't the same. Some things are just lost when they are lost.
This is where I made my biggest personal mistake in pandemic response: I seriously underestimated the impact of these closures on my kids. By this point I guess I was getting caught up in the calls for sacrifice and unity. Not being able to go back to campus just didn't seen like a big deal. But for my kids, it really was a big loss. In the blink of an eye a text message had taken away most of their happiness: they had lost their independence and suddenly found themselves back in the rooms they had lived in as elementary and high school kids. Suddenly they had to deal with their parents again. Their social lives were, in many ways, over.
For Elisa and me, as for many parents, the impact really
wasn't that bad. We had each other. We
were just being asked to spend more time in the house that we spent most of our
time in anyway. I had retired in
September 2019, so I was already accustomed to more time at home . In fact the
shut-down actually made our neighborhood seem more lively -- streets that had
been empty during the work-week now had kids riding bikes, parents pushing baby
carriages, people walking or running for exercise. So for us, it just wasn't
so bad. But it was very bad for our
kids. And I was kind of blind to this.
Like many, I was trying to understand what was going on, and
I was spending a lot of time on the internet, trying to come to terms with the
problem. Much of what I found was
medical, scientific info. Our son was a
bio-technology major, I just stated forwarding articles to him. I didn't realize that each of these forwards
were -- for him -- just reminders of his dismal situation. The articles helped me understand, but I
didn't understand how they were bringing my son further into the pandemic
gloom.
Things came to a head when Billy suddenly announced that he
wanted to go back to his off-campus apartment in Harrisonburg Va. I was really shocked by this. He'd obviously be exposed to the virus.
Wouldn't he want to come back to see us?
This was before testing was widely available. It seemed reckless and selfish to me. "Look, I don't want to end up on a
ventilator, OK?" I said. When
you're 62, it is easy to forget how things look to a someone who is 22. Billy went out to Harrisonburg. We didn't part on good terms. But a few days later he asked if he could
come home. Things just weren't the same
on campus.
Of course he could
come home. And when he did, I decided
to ease up. No more doom-scrolling
e-mails from me. No more griping from me
about household chores (I'd load the dishwasher). No more complaining from me about the use of
home delivery from restaurants -- that was one extravagance that connected the
kids to their life in what was coming to be known melodramatically as "the
before times." I just pledged to try to be more conscious of how hard the
situation was for them. But in a certain
sense I was right. It turned out that serious, life-threatening cases of COVID were very close to Billy at his college. So we were right to
be careful; I was right to be uneasy about his unvaccinated return to campus,
especially when I knew he’d then be coming home to us, possibly bringing COVID
with him.
Maria had similar problems.
She'd be quite careful for long periods, but when the Christmas holidays
rolled around she started to get invited to parties being thrown by similarly
exiled-from-campus friends. She'd pledge
to stay outside with a mask on at proper social distance, but it was cold out
there, these were her friends, and there would be some alcohol. We'd end up asking her to go in by the back
door and to stay away from the rest of us until she got tested (by this point
you could go to a testing center to be checked out). She had many tests. She was a good sport about it.
There were some comical events in the early days of the
pandemic. Through the Veterans
Administration I'd recently been given access to military base shopping
facilities -- the PX system. One day in
mid-March 2020, Elisa and I decided to give the PX at Fort Myers Virginia a
try. We got in without trouble, but we
were puzzled by what we found. At the
Commissary, the shelves were largely devoid of food. Wow, access to this just didn't seem like
such a great benefit. We really didn't
connect the empty shelves to the looming pandemic. We weren't even scrounging for toilet paper
at this point, but as we walked down one of the aisles, a Commissary employee
appeared before us with a large package of coveted toilet paper. She told us they had found it in the storage
room and asked us if we wanted it. I
started to say no, but Elisa -- with her maternal hording instincts kicking in
-- immediately said yes. We went home with the TP.
A few weeks later it was Cherry Blossom time in
Washington. We decided to go to my old
place of assignment, Fort McNair in Southwest DC. They had plenty of cherry trees, and we'd be
able to avoid crowds. The guards at the
gate -- who had always been very welcoming -- were now cold and officious. They almost didn't let us in. They finally did, but they warned us that
from now on it would be "official business only." And apparently walking along the river looking
at flowering trees would not be a good enough reason. Things were starting to tighten up.
Then there were the painted rocks. As I went out for my afternoon walks, I noticed that someone -- presumably a kid -- had painted small stones with bright colors and cheery sayings: "Love Conquers All" and things like that. People would decorate their sidewalks in chalk with similar expressions. I liked all this at first, but soon they began to fade into the background noise of the pandemic. It gradually became sort of "pandemic solidarity theater." Later, Maria's boyfriend Taz captured the change in reactions when he admitted, "I hated those damn pots and pans."
There was a lot of confusion. "Flatten the curve" became the goal
-- the idea was that we just had to make sure that the number of cases never
exceeded the capacity of our hospitals to handle them. Early in the pandemic ventilators were seen
as being the key to COVID survival -- the fear was that we'd soon not have
enough ventilators. Friends even
launched an effort to design a simple home-made ventilator that could be easily
reproduced in third-world countries. We
just didn't realize that 1) in spite of our best efforts to flatten curves
hospitals would soon be overwhelmed and 2) ventilators -- far from being our
salvation, were instead machines that usually just painfully postponed
death -- most intubated patients did not survive.
Early on, there was a lot of talk about contact
tracing: once someone with COVID was
identified, the public health service would swing into action and carefully
trace all of the people around them who had been exposed. In this way, the spread of the pandemic could
be controlled. But scandalously, this
never happened in the United States. I
think Trump’s mindless opposition to effective action against the pandemic was
a big part of this failure – there was never a national effort to trace
contacts. Some state and local
governments seemed to try to do this using modern technology. I have on my phone an ap that supposedly will
inform me if I had ever come within Bluetooth range of a person who had
COVID. But I think I must have been one
of very few people in Virginia to download this ap. The thing beeps forlornly from time-to-time,
pathetically informing me that there has been another period of “nothing to
report.”
Weeks before we were all told to wear masks, news reports
appeared about severe shortages of Personal Protective Equipment, especially of
the coveted N-95 masks. We discovered
that we had one -- it had been left over from one of Billy's classes. We briefly agonized over whether we should
send it to friends who were doctors in besieged New York City. In retrospect, our struggle with what to do with
that ONE MASK seems ridiculous and quaint.
But we had never done this before.
Then on April 3, 2020, came the instructions to mask-up. At first masks were not available, so we
tried to make masks from bits of cloth and rubber bands. This didn't work very well. Then we tried various kinds of bandanas,
including the "gators" allegedly used by troops in the desert. These looked kind of cool, but didn't really
work. Eventually we settled on KN-95s --
Chinese versions of the N-95s.
All this was taking place in the context of scary reports of
mass death in Italy, Spain, New York City and elsewhere. Many of the most hard-hit places were well
known to us. And we soon started to
receive very personal reports of sickness and death. Elisa's cousin the DR is a medical doctor --
he got COVID early on and was intubated -- he survived, but it was touch and go
for a long time. The woman who designed
Elisa's wedding dress died of COVID in the DR.
Our dear friend Rocio, a Spanish pediatrician who had helped care for us
in the Azores lost her father. Then a
really crushing blow -- Elisa's best friend from high school lost both her
parents in the DR -- Elisa knew both these people very well. One of my best friends from college lost his
wife in New York – I called him to express condolences.
In early April the remake of an old song started bouncing
around the internet – “Mad World” by Curt Smith of the 80’s rock duo Tears for
Fears, recorded this time with the help of his 16-year-old daughter Diva,
really struck a very melancholy cord.
The lyrics talk about dreams of dying, no tomorrow, and kids in school. For
me, that’s now the song of the pandemic. Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEpfvTdR5-U
Pandemic Summer 2020
In early June 2020 Billy moved to Boston. This was actually great news -- while many of
his classmates were unemployed and moving back into their parents' homes, Billy
got a job at a neuroscience research lab in Boston. Finding housing up there provided some
pandemic angst and a few chuckles. It
was clear that to live in Cambridge roommates would be necessary. Bill found one house that seemed suitable. But then one of the residents started
imposing conditions on the newcomer. She
wanted him to sign agreements specifying how he would get to work (no mass
transit!) and who he'd be allowed to have over as visitors (no guests -- this
would really hurt a young fellow's social life). It was absurd, but it was a
pandemic absurdity.
It wasn't all doom and gloom. Like I said, the pandemic -- especially in
that first Spring and Summer -- seemed to make the neighborhood a bit more
lively. At first, even the bike trail seemed hazardous – what if that guy ahead
of you sneezed or coughed? After a
while, we came to accept that the danger outside was not very serious.
Often I'd take a walk through the neighborhood. People seemed friendlier. People waved and said hello. There was a definite effort to give others
the six feet of space required by the new social distancing norms -- when
people approached on the sidewalks, one of them would step out into the street
to give the other room and space. I helped
some of the pandemic bicyclists by puting chains back on one or two
bicycles. In spite of the gloomy
context, it was all very nice -- we got to know our neighbors better.
People looked for ways to keep family members happy. The elementary school around the corner
became an informal gathering point for people with children. The kids would ride their bikes or skate in
the parking lots. People needed to get
out of their houses and apartments -- this seemed like a good way to do it. We
sometimes took our Golden Retriever Cappuccio to the school. He was a real star there.
And we looked for ways to watch out for each other. We have a good friend who is 86 years old and
lives alone. We started to call him
every day to see how he was doing. We'd
meet from time-to-time in my front yard (masks on!) to have some almost-normal
social contact.
Sometimes things seemed so normal that you'd forget they were
not. Soon after a new neighbor moved in
I crossed paths with him while out on a walk.
Instinctively I extended my hand to greet him. He seemed to jump back several feet! Ooops.
I forgot. Sorry!
The medical uncertainty of the pandemic and the constant TV
news discussion of every new development or rumor spurred not only some
unhealthy gloom-scrolling and message forwarding, but also some medical
precautions that -- in retrospect -- seem over the top.
I had been scheduled to get hearing aids from the Veterans
Administration -- I cancelled the appointment because I just didn't want to
risk infection.
On the shelf in our downstairs bedroom I started to
accumulate medical supplies. At first it
was just thermometers and cough medicine.
Then surgical gloves. Then on CNN
Sanjay Guptah started talking about pulse dosimeters to check the oxygen levels
of COVID patients. So we got one of
those. It was all kind of morbid.
In June I started to see reports that said that certain
other vaccinations might provide some additional protection against severe
COVID. There was talk about the
tuberculosis vaccine BCG (but this just wasn't available in the U.S.) Then there were reports that a booster from
the Mumps, Measles and Rubella (MMR) shot might help prevent severe
symptoms. Back in 2019 the Defense
Department had been urging me to get an MMR booster in preparation for a trip
to Guatemala and Costa Rica. I had
demurred, but now I reconsidered. I
found out that our local pharmacy would give us the shots. I was careful not to barge in claiming that
the MMR shot would save us from COVID -- I think that might have set off some
"crazy person" alarms. Instead
I just repeated the advice from DoD and talked about the possibility of future
travel. Bham, Elisa and I were soon
boosted, and soon we got shots for both our kids. The jury is still out on how useful this all
was, but no harm was done, it might help, and it gave us a sense of finally
doing something to protect ourselves.
That was far from the nuttiest thing we considered. In December 2020, when vaccines started to
be rolled out, a good friend in India contacted me saying that he thought he
might be able to send us some doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. He knew someone who was travelling and said he
could send it to us packed in dry ice.
What do you say to an offer like this?
With daily reports of COVID deaths all around you, you say
"Yes!" Our friend really
tried, but in the end couldn't do it.
This was just as well -- it would have all been highly problematic for
many reasons. But we really appreciated
the effort.
By this point Trump had apparently decided to wrap himself
completely in anti-science and had become a very overt flouter of his own
government’s health recommendations. In
July I put this on my Facebook page:
Bill Meara
Shared with Public
This
current wave of infections is the result of Trump's completely selfish and
irresponsible actions on COVID: He ridiculed governors who tried to contain the
spread. He called for the "liberation" of states that were trying to
control the virus. He supported the armed thugs who occupied state houses and
demanded that the states be "opened up." He refuses to set the
example by wearing a mask. He holds densely packed rallies in states with
skyrocketing infection rates. He desperately wants to send people back to work
in the hope that somehow this will revive the economy in time for the election.
This could have been managed successfully. Other countries managed it
successfully. But we have Trump as president, so we are failing. Anyone who
supported Trump or his party shares in the responsibility for this.
From the earliest
days, we could see that almost every aspect of the pandemic was being
politicized by the right. Wearing a mask
– even though the Trump administration had told us to do this – became
associated with opposition to Trump.
In late May George Floyd was murdered by the police in
Minnesota. That murder -- and the many
others like it -- changed things for us.
Protests and demonstrations that would have been considered unthinkable
suddenly seemed obligatory. There were
demonstrations around the White House.
On June 1, 2020 Maria told us that she and some of her friends were
going into DC to carry water to the demonstrators. Maria had been really shaken by the George
Floyd video and wanted to do something in response. She was Lafayette Square
area for a portion of the afternoon. I
was watching developments on TV and monitoring Maria's location via her
I-phone. I was relieved when I saw her
phone moving away from Lafayette Square and back into Virginia.
The police attack on protesters came very shortly after my daughter left the area. She could have easily been among those bludgeoned, punched, body-slammed or tear gassed by the police. In videos from the scene, we can clearly see policemen dressed like gladiators charging into the crowd, slamming protesters with their shield and punching Australian journalists. A closer look at the videos revealed exactly which Police Departments were involved in this assault: Police from Arlington County, Virginia (right across the Potomac River from DC) and the United States Park Police were the most vicious. Adding insult to injury, we later learned that this violence carried out by the police allowed Trump to walk across Lafayette Square from the White House, Bible in hand, to stage a photo op at the church. That was, for me, one of the lowest points for the truly horrible Trump administration. A few weeks later I was at home when we got a call from a police association asking us to make a donation for the police. I told him my daughter had been at Lafayette Square. He went silent at that point. They don't call anymore.
A few days after Lafayette Square, I mentioned to Maria that
I though Trump’s action was a bit of an experiment on his part. “What do you mean?” she asked. I said I thought that in preparation for the
November 2020 election he was trying to find out how much he could get away
with, and which of various police and military forces he could count on. Maria had trouble accepting that things had
gotten this bad. January 6, 2021 would
prove that they had, in fact, gotten this bad.
As time went on, we began to realize that hope for normality
lay with the development of a vaccine.
The news reports were good, but in June 2020 we had some first-person
contact with a vaccine maker. Liz, the
daughter of my cousin Mary, came to visit us in Virginia. Liz had been with us for about six weeks in
Rome. Liz's boyfriend was with her -- he
worked on the logistical side of a major vaccine manufacturer. He was quite confident that good news was
soon to come. This was very encouraging.
Late in that summer, Maria and her boyfriend went to Georgia
for a family event. While there, she was
surprised to find a lot of people ignoring social distance and mask use
guidelines. There were even people who ridiculed her for wearing a mask.
Pandemic Fall 2020
In Fall 2020 Maria started to complain that we had not
visited her at Virginia Tech. So, COVID
concerns notwithstanding, out we went.
In retrospect it really was kind of reckless, but parents know that when
their child pines for a visit, it is hard to say no. On the way out to Virginia Tech, we stopped
off at a house in the Shenandoah valley to pick up a shortwave radio that
someone had agreed to give me. When he
handed to me, he warned me to be careful at Virginia Tech – his daughter was
there and, he said, there was a lot of COVID.
The warning was kind of ominous. The
campus seemed to be going through a mixture of COVID denial and COVID vigilance: in spite of no in-person classes, most of the
off-campus students had returned to the area, but there were a lot of people
wearing masks. We somehow managed to
stay safe.
There were other trips too.
My 86-year-old mother was in deteriorating health in New York. Early in the pandemic I avoided going up
there, thinking a visit from me would be too risky, mostly for her, but also
for me. But as time went on it became
more and more difficult to put off visits.
So I made a few pandemic trips up to New York. Of course, the New York City area had been
very hard hit by the first wave of the pandemic, and I started to see the
results right away. The little suburban
town in which I had grown up would not let me -- now a non-resident -- walk
through their park.
I have a lot of hobbies and interests, but
even I found myself looking for things to do.
Early in the pandemic, for the first time in my life, I grew a
beard. I left it there for a couple of
months, making perfunctory efforts to trim it.
It was kind of interesting but I wasn't crazy about it and neither were
the other members of the family, so I shaved it off.
Haircuts were a problem. It seemed quite risky to go to a barber shop, so for more than year, I didn't. I would occasionally give myself a partial haircut, sometimes with less-than satisfactory results. Sometimes Elisa would help. But most of the time it was DIY hair-cutting with sub-optimal tools.
Ham radio kept my happily occupied for many hours each day. My friend Pete Juliano and I have a podcast with several thousand regular listeners, many of whom were in the more vulnerable demographics. We urged them to "SITS" "Stay In The Shack" (the radio shack -- the workshop for radio hams). We talked about projects we were undertaking to keep busy. I built a radio receiver for the 31 Meter shortwave band. I called it the Quarantine 31, Q-31 for short.
And there was astronomy.
I have a small telescope (a 6-inch Newtonian) that Elisa got me for
Christmas years ago. One morning I
noticed a bright red object high in the pre-dawn sky. What luck!
It was Mars, and I quickly learned from the internet that the Red Planet
was approaching "opposition" -- it's closest approach to earth and
the best time to observe it.
I wrote this on my blog:
Sometimes waking up a
bit earlier when the sunrise is coming later leads you to some interesting
things.
It was quite humid in
Northern Virginia on the morning of 25 August 2020, but the skies were
surprisingly clear. I stepped outside at
about 0500 local time, coffee cup in hand.
Venus was blazing in the east.
Then I saw this big very bright red thing high in the southern sky. It seemed almost too bright and too high in
the sky to be Mars. But a quick check
with Stellarium showed that it was in fact the Red Planet. I pulled out my six-inch Dobsonian reflector
telescope and soon had Mars in the eyepiece.
For the first time in
many years I could see surface features:
It is springtime in the southern hemisphere of Mars, but the Southern
Polar Cap (which recedes in the summer) was still very prominent (in my
eyepiece it was near the top). I could
also see an albedo (dark on light) feature below the icecap.
I went out again on
the morning of 26 August 2020. Again the
Southern Polar Cap was very visible.
Below it, near the center of the disc,
I could make out a large albedo feature.
I am pretty sure that is Mare Erythraeum.
This was a great time for me to see these things. I'm almost done with the second book in Kim
Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy --
much of the story takes place in sanctuaries carved under the Southern ice cap,
and in Hellas (which Robinson's colonists are filling with water). During the 2018 Earth-Mars opposition a big
dust storm made it impossible for me to see anything on Mars; a similar storm
takes place during book one of Robinson's Trilogy. And right now the
Perseverance rover is on its way to Mars.
From late August through early October 2020, Mars helped
keep my occupied during the pandemic.
Chess. Like millions
of others, I turned to chess during the pandemic. My brother Ed and I had learned to play from
out Russian emigree neighbor Oleg Yazinsky.
He was quite good. I didn't play
much over the years, but I was always kind of interested in the game. Enter the pandmic. I started playing computer chess with
an online program from Germany called
Fritz. Fritz was hard. Fritz was brutal. Even by setting my skill level quite low,
Fritz usually trounced me. It was very
discouraging. Then came the Netflix
series "The Queen's Gambit."
Beth Harmon walked into our lives and made chess cool. Soon I discovered chess.com which was far
less brutal than Fritz. Chess.com
allowed for more nuance and detail in setting skill levels. I started out playing 1200 level bots; by the
end of the pandemic I was approaching the 1500 level. Thank you Fritz. Thank you Beth. And above all, thank you Mr. Yazinsky.
I rode my old bicycle more than I ever had. I would head out on Virginia’s Washington and
Old Dominion trail, heading west, instead of the easterly path I took during my
working years. I would follow the trail
for four miles, stopping at a baseball field in the town of Vienna where I
would pause to read a bit before heading back to Falls Church. This was a good outlet – it kept me in shape
and got me out of the house. As the
pandemic wore on, I started to notice more and more electric bicycles on the
trail. They weren’t supposed to be
there, but it seemed like many were being used by people who had to get to work
and didn’t want to run the risk of going into the Metro trains. So I hope nobody complained about these
folks. I certainly didn’t.
But it couldn't all be fun and games. When I retired I pledged not to spend the
rest of my life, uh, amusing myself. I
would not spend all my time building radios, peering through telescopes and
playing computer chess with Fritz.
No, I told myself that I'd find
at least a few socially useful things for me to do.
Soon after I retired, I found one. The Literacy Council of Northern Virginia
teaches immigrants to speak, read and write in English. We were still teaching in the Council's
classrooms when the pandemic hit. I
really thought the program was over. Of
course, at that point none of us really appreciated how long the crisis would
last. Luckily, forward looking people at
the Council quickly launched plans to continue instruction on-line.
I had my doubts about this. Many of our students didn't seem very
computer savvy. And most of them had
nothing more than old cell phones -- some of them flip phones. I myself had never heard of Zoom. When asked about which online program we
should use, I recommended Skype -- I was familiar with that one (from my
podcast) and I kind of assumed that this was the program that many of our
immigrant students used to keep in touch with the wives and children who had
remained in Central America when they came north to earn a living for the
family. I was wrong. Zoom was better. Soon we were all on Zoom -- along with the rest of the world. And it worked very well.
Zoom protected us all from the spread of the virus, but not
from news of the pandemic's consequences.
Many of my students fell ill with the disease. Many others worried about the fate of sick
relatives back in their home countries.
But even in the midst of all this suffering, people joked and
laughed. Someone would cough or sneeze,
and, after a nervous moment, someone else would say, "Good thing we're on
Zoom!" I'm big on April Fools
jokes, but I just couldn't do one on the pandemic -- but I found one that came
close. When class convened on April 1,
2021, I was wearing very dark sunglasses.
Without the slightest hint of levity, I informed our students that the
Literacy Council of Northern Virginia was worried about the amount of radiation
we were all getting from the computer screens.
So, you see, they were mailing all of us these dark glasses. I got mine first, but -- don't worry! --
everyone else would soon be getting theirs in the mail. Henceforth, we'd just have to go through
classes like this. Our students were
real troopers, willing to go along with whatever insanity the gringos came up
with. One student chuckled in Spanish
that we'd all look like "The Men in Black." To set the hook, I asked if everyone was
willing to wear the glasses. They
were. That gave me the chance to teach
them some American slang: Gotcha!
Routine household stuff went on, often with a pandemic
twist. Elisa's business was booming,
but she was using a corner of our downstairs room as her home office. I had to pass through it on my way to my
workshop. I was starting to drive her
nuts. For a time, we thought about
putting one of those "office pods" (a small building in kit form) in
the backyard for her, but I doubted her ability to sit out there in the woods,
alone in the dark and cold. I came up
with another option: a new wall and
door to partition off her home office.
It worked very well.
Halloween 2020 was quite depressing. I like Halloween. I like how neighbors – often people we hadn’t
met yet – accompany their kids to our door.
There are immigrant families living in apartment houses close-by –
Halloween is a chance to meet them, and to be nice to their kids. It is fun.
I was hoping that we could have at least a socially distant
Halloween. I rigged up a way for me to
stay behind our storm door, and lower by rope a basket of candy for the kids I
hoped would come. But sadly, only two
came, and they arrived late in the afternoon, only after I had assured their
parents that it would be safe. The
pandemic had put a real damper on Halloween.
Interest rates plummeted and refinancing the mortgage
started to look like a good idea. A
cash-out re-fi would provide funds for an apartment in the Dominican Republic
that we hoped to buy. I started talking
to our mortgage broker. But the
pandemic was everywhere -- in the course of our mortgage talk I learned that he
and his wife were having a very hard time with the virus. She had medical conditions that put her at
high risk and he lived in fear of bringing the virus home from work. He told me he was stripping down on the back
porch rather than enter the house with possibly contaminated clothing.
And closing on this re-fi was also very different because of
the pandemic. The closing agent came to
our house, but we met out in our front yard.
With masks on we went through the hundreds of pages of documents,
struggling to keep them from blowing away.
November 2020 was also, of course, election time in the
United States. Trump’s appalling
performance during the pandemic killed a lot of people. He was incapable of
exercising leadership – all he did was pander to his science-denying base,
joining them in their distrust of the “elitist” experts who were telling them
to wear masks, stay at home, not go to motorcycle conventions, get vaccinated,
etc. The impatience and intolerance of
these people – and of Trump – reminded me of children who fuss about putting on
their seatbelts. Or the people who keep
on smoking cigarettes because they just don’t believe that it is harmful.
Voting in the 2020 election was, ever since that dark day
that Trump became president, very important to us. The pandemic made it more important and a bit
more difficult.
Voting by mail was clearly the best way to go, but when
Trump started railing against voting by mail, and taking steps to slow down
mail delivery, we started to worry about that.
Might he find some way to prevent our votes from being counted? Yea, he might. So we decided to vote in person, even though
this involved some additional COVID risk.
Fairfax County Virginia published a schedule for early voting – starting in September there were early voting locations all around the county. Elisa, our friend Nathan, and I tried to use one nearby site, but even in September we found really long lines. We tried a second time, and were again deterred by the long lines. Finally, on October 16, 2020, we went to the Fairfax County government offices and waited patiently in line for our turn to vote. We succeeded, but even at the voting facility we saw signs of stubborn, ignorant resistance to sensible policies: one of the poll workers didn’t have a mask on, instead he had one of those flimsy face shields that some people – who whined about wearing masks – put on in a kind of passive aggressive compliance with face-covering mandates.
In 2020 we worried that it might happen again. And – polls notwithstanding – it almost did. Our friend Nathan had planned a celebratory dinner at our house for the day after the election. It pained me to tell him that the celebration might be premature.
We had the celebratory dinner, but as you can see in the picture, we had it outside. Being outside was seen, during those pandemic days, as being safer than being inside.
On November 7, 2020 Elisa and I were in
Washington. We were probably going in to
pick up food from one of the few Dominican restaurants in the city. Suddenly, horns started blaring, and people
on the sidewalks started giving each other high fives. It took us a moment to realize what had
happened: a winner (well actually a
loser) had been declared. It was over
(or so we thought).
Our beloved dog, Cappuccio, died later in November. We got him as a puppy ten years earlier, soon after we came back to the U.S. from Europe. He was a beautiful Golden Retriever. My wife and the kids were really devastated by his death. Because of the pandemic, during visits to the vet we had to wait in the car out in the parking lot for a vet technician to come out and get poor ‘Pucio. On his last night he was in so much pain that we had to make an emergency run to the animal hospital, where they put him to sleep.
The winter of ‘20-21 was really bad. We’d all become dependent on walks and bike
rides – the winter weather kept us from doing these things. And the pandemic news was all bad.
I began to realize how much we had come to dislike the
impact that it had had on our lives. The
masks were perhaps the most visible symbol of this. We knew that the masks protected us and those
around us, and we were scrupulous in using them, but still, we came to really
dislike them. Refusing to use the masks would have been an unthinkable act of
child-like petulance – it would be like whining to the government, “But I don’t
LIKE the mask, mommy!” Nobody likes the masks, but most of us were willing to
wear them to protect our communities.
How much we had come to dislike them could be seen in the way we tried
to hide them when taking family pictures.
Not only would we ask – if we were at a safe distance in an outdoor
space – for people to temporarily remove their masks for the picture, we’d also
ask them to HIDE the mask from the camera’s lens. We didn’t want to see the ugly things at
all.
And it was just so weird that everyone was wearing
them. We’d go to a shopping area and
EVERYONE would be masked. We were glad
they were, but we often remarked about how strange, how weird it really
was. If you had told us a year before
that we’d be living like this, we would have thought you were crazy. It was like something out of dystopian Sci-Fi.
We started to notice that the single people we knew were
having a really hard time. Some seemed
almost despondent. The pandemic was very
hard on single people living alone. We
did what we could to help, sometimes calling to try to cheer people up, other
times staging over-the-phone interventions to get people to seek help.
My mother died in December. Her foot had been bothering her. It took a turn for the worse and my sister
had to move her into a hospice. The
hospice would allow only one family member to visit. So we, like so many other families during the
pandemic, did not get to say goodbye in person to my mom. It was all very painful.
It was a very difficult winter and we all were kind of
grasping for good news. A bit of it
came on February 18, 2021 when NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on
Mars. Wow, it was all not gloom and doom
-- something worked. My son Billy was in
Boston when this happened. He is not
really a space nerd (like I am) but he told me that this technological success
moved him. He got a little teary eyed as
he watched the masked NASA techs celebrating a much needed victory.
Vaccinations in Spring 2021
Billy was the first one in our family to get
vaccinated. That neuroscience lab in
Boston was part of Massachusetts General Hospital. The whole staff got vaxed. Billy really needed it -- he had been working
for six months with a mask on all day, and the social isolation in a strange
city was hard on him. He had never seen
the full faces of many of his co-workers, and it was almost impossible for him
to meet people outside work. That was
rough. Two shots of Moderna helped
remedy that situation. Billy was very
sick after the second shot, but it was worth it.
Maria was next. She
was out at Virginia Tech. I'd been
reading about the priorities for vaccination.
I'd noticed that school teachers had priority. "But dad, I only teach via
Zoom!" I pointed out that she was
on Zoom because of COVID. She soon
joined her brother in receiving two shots of Moderna. She too was sick after the second shot.
I thought I'd have to wait a long time for vaccination -- I
was a youthful 62 years of age. The
Fairfax County Virginia vaccination sign-up site was kind unclear about
pre-existing conditions. I have high
blood pressure but wasn't sure if that qualified me. Thinking that someone would call to talk
about this, I signed up. Next thing I
knew, I was set to go in for the first shot of Pfizer on March 13, 2021.
In Virginia, these shots were usually given at the
facilities of the county government. We
were instructed to proceed to the parking lot of the government building in
Fairfax, Virginia. Once there, we received text messages telling us when to
come in. This was the same building in
which we had voted just four months earlier.
After the shot, we had to sit down and wait for a while in hall where
workers kept an eye on us, looking for potential reaction to the shot. Then we were out the door, carrying with us
CDC shot cards confirming our vaccination.
Three weeks later I took the second shot. I had some reaction to the second shot -- I
felt like I had a cold for about 12 hours.
Elisa was the last one of us to get vaxed. Her pre-existing condition was asthma. She expected no problem from the vaccine, but
the second shot of Pfizer made her quite sick.
We were very happy to get the shots. We had to wait a few
weeks for the vaccines to produce the effect we needed, but we all were
very pleased to have this protection from COVID. I’m not sure we realized it at the time, but
this round of vaccinations marked a real turning point in the pandemic. I think a lot of us naively thought that the
vaccinations would end the pandemic.
They did not, but our approach to the disease and the precautions we had
to take changed significantly after the shots.
The pandemic continued, but it was now divided into two periods: pre-vaccine and post-vaccine.
The vaccines were every bit as politicized as the
masks. We had a few friends and
relatives who dove deeply into the ant-vaccine conspiracy theories: they repeated lies about the supposedly
nefarious purposes of the vaccines: Bill
Gates was trying to put microchips in all of us. The vaccines would leave us sterile. They weren’t even really vaccines at
all. It became pretty clear what was
really going on: Trump’s base was
anti-intellectual, and anti-science. So
Trump wrapped himself in this populist ignorance. This reinforced the mindless ideas of the
base. Soon, getting vaccinated came to
be seen by these people as something that Democrats do. And they would apparently rather risk death than do something that was seen as “Democrat behavior.”
During April and May of 2021 the Cicadas of Brood X arrived
in Northern Virginia. This just added to
the weirdness of the pandemic. Not only
were we all wearing masks and staying home and fretting about viruses, but now
billions of strange bugs were crawling out of the ground and making ominous
noises.
By late May 2021 we were in Santo Domingo in the Dominican
Republic. We knew that the DR still had a very serious COVID problem. But now we were fully vaccinated, and we
really needed to look in on Elisa’s family.
So, knowing that we’d need to have a COVID test before we could come
home, off we went. It was our first
visit to my wife's elderly parents in more than 15 months. The inability to visit them was one of the
toughest parts of the pandemic for us. Elisa is her mom's only child. And Elisa's mom is failing; dementia is
slowly but steadily taking her away from us, and making it more and more
difficult for her to manage the precautions required for pandemic
survival. Early in the pandemic, for
example, we found out that Elisa's mom and her twin sister were insisting on
their weekly visits to the local supermarket.
"Everyone looks fine!" they explained. That provoked a frantic long-distance search
for ways to get them food without getting them COVID.
Elisa's parents both got two shots of the Chinese vaccine
Sino-vax. But the vaccine status of
those around them is kind of flaky. The
twin sister took one shot, but not the second (she had a sore throat that day
-- during our June 2021 visit, Elisa took her in for the second shot). A relative showed up to visit Elisa (and the
elderly parents) only to announce that she was not taking the vaccine because
of "guidance" from her evangelical church. At this point only 9.6% of the Dominican
population were vaccinated (the U.S. is at 41%). COVID was still on everyone's mind. While we were there Elisa learned that a
friend in his mid-40s, a much-loved Dominican diplomat stationed in Colombia,
died of the virus. That was a real
shock.
Once in the DR, the reality of the COVID threat seemed to
close in on us. There were frequent
reports of prominent people dying or almost dying. Poverty and crowding made it apparent that
Dominicans – especially poor Dominicans, just couldn’t maintain social
distance. Everyone was wearing masks,
but there was obviously plenty of places for the virus to spread. This was more than enough to give even a
fully vaccinated person a bit of COVID hypochondria.
Elisa started to feel some cold symptoms, and because she
was spending so much time with her parents, she decided to get tested for
COVID. She took a rapid antigen test
and, to our great confusion, tested POSITIVE.
How could that be?
How could a fully vaccinated person who’d only been in the country six
days -- and who had been masked the whole time -- have COVID? It didn’t seem to make sense. Adding to the confusion, Elisa had at the
same time taken an antibody test, which showed that she had anti-Covid
Antibodies – which you’d expect as a result of the vaccination. We decided to test again, and, in the
meantime, stay in isolation.
That evening we consulted with family members in the medical
profession. They were quite cautious,
and seemed to put a lot of faith in the test results.
The next day Elisa tested again, this time she took both a
rapid test and a PCR molecular test. The
results of the rapid test came back within four hours: POSITIVE!
At this point I started to get really worried.
Then the phone rang – it was our doctor in Virginia
returning our call. She told us that it
was highly unlikely that Elisa actually had COVID. She pointed out that some of the rapid
antigen tests have a “cross receptivity” problem that causes them to interpret
the common cold as COVID. She advised
waiting for the PCR results.
The following morning, the PCR results were in: NEGATIVE!
Hurray. Our faith in the vaccine
and modern medicine was restored. It all
seemed to make sense: they were using
inaccurate rapid antigen tests that had picked up Elisa’s cold symptoms.
But by then we were within 72 hours of our scheduled return
to the U.S. We’d both need to test
NEGATIVE to get on the plane. We were
flying on Tuesday afternoon – we decided to take PCR tests on Sunday
morning. Results would be available on
Monday morning.
We woke up Monday ready to see the negative test results and
to begin our travel back to the U.S.
Elisa logged on and got my PCR results:
NEGATIVE. Great. I felt certain that Elisa would also test
negative. Wrong. She tested POSITIVE on the PCR test. This was really nuts. She’d had two POSITIVE
rapid antigen tests, then a NEGATIVE PCR test, then, just two days later, a
POSITIVE PCR test. It seemed like
something was wrong with the testing.
One more test for Elisa.
We went to another lab in Santo Domingo for another rapid antigen
test. Soon after taking the test, with our fingers
crossed, we started the 2 hour drive east from Santo Domingo to the airport at
Punta Cana. Around noon, I had to make
a pit stop. As I stepped out of the car
heading for the men’s room I turned to Elisa and said, “Check on your results
honey. Good luck! I’ll miss you!” I also asked her not to mess with me
regarding the results – this was no time for kidding around. When I got back from the rest room, there
was a smile on Elisa’s face.
NEGATIVE. We were going home.
We still had a few more rounds to go with
COVID. Billy and Maria both eventually
got the illness, but – probably thanks to the vaccines – they were not seriously
ill. Elisa may have had it. I don’t think I ever got it, but I might have
had an asymptomatic case.
COVID CONCLUSIONS
It was bad, but fortunately for us it was not really so bad. We all survived. In 1918 we had family members who did not
survive. In this pandemic, suffering was
very uneven. In our family, for example,
the pandemic was a lot harder on our college-aged kids than it was on us.
And it wasn’t all gloom and doom. Funny things did happen. Dark clouds did have
some silver linings. We adapted and
survived. We learned to Zoom and to work from home. Some of us began to think about what is
important in life, and realized that it isn’t all about going into an office. Science developed a vaccine. Things got
better.
The political reaction to the pandemic was a reminder of how much of the country has gone completely off the deep end. The anti-science, anti-“elite,” anti-government proclivities of much of the population were exploited by the Republican right for political benefit. These politicians were willing to put millions of people at mortal risk just because doing so would help them win a primary or a general election. Trump was the worst of them. His political antics led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
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