The Third Anniversary Approaches

As we approach the three-year anniversary of the massive national shutdown triggered by COVID, I have some perspective on the fears and hopes I have written about before.??My grandchildren appear to be okay. I hear all the time, though, about those who are not okay: they have lost grandparents (who are sometimes their caregivers); they have lost parents, siblings, friends. Some have relatives whose lives have been upended by long COVID while others suffered financial harm from which they are still recovering.?

My middle grandchildren, born just weeks before the pandemic began, are celebrating their third birthdays. Having been isolated for the better part of two years, they now get sick more than they otherwise would have and, as any parent knows, a sick child creates chaos where before there was routine.??That said, we hope they will gradually build the immunity they didn’t acquire during two years of isolation and will eventually become just ordinary instead of extraordinary little germ factories.

We heard very little from them when they were two-year-olds during the worst of COVID. Back then, they had very little relationship with the larger world.?But in the past year, they have both discovered the power of speech and now never stop talking (be careful what you wish for). Our oldest grandchild, just seven, is conscious of her world, the world as it is and has been for the better part of her conscious life. She sees it as a safe place where masks sometimes come out –in recognition of “the bad germ" –?but her world looks pretty much like a typical seven-year-old's would. The baby in our family knows only the world she has always inhabited, and she is, by and large, a rosy, cheerful explorer.

Their grandparents are in a different place. After nearly three years of carefully evading COVID (as most of our family has done) – not living under a rock but still wearing masks in ride-shares, on planes, and in indoor public locations, avoiding restaurants and lengthy (read “interesting”) travel, skipping weddings, testing before family visits, running HEPA filters, and worrying about getting sick – our game of hide and seek came to an end in December. Somewhere on a trip from Boston to DC, the new variant caught up with me, although I didn’t know it right away.?

I can’t be sure who “patient zero” was, but I have my suspicions. I rode to the airport (masked) on a cold, windy day in a car whose windows were closed against the elements.??The unmasked driver quickly engaged me in a conversation about the government’s bad COVID messaging. “They shouldn’t tell me what to do. They have no right. It’s a personal decision.”??Hmmm, I thought, I’ve heard that argument before.?

I spent two days in meetings where I was just about the only person wearing a mask (a lucky thing for my maskless colleagues). On the second evening, my husband and I celebrated my birthday at an outdoor restaurant that boasts an abundance of heat lamps. It was cold, so we bundled up: I called it camping with fancy food.??That birthday night my throat felt scratchy, and I wondered out loud if we should buy a humidifier.??The next morning, I woke up sick. In retrospect, I’m amazed: it didn’t cross my mind that I might have COVID. A cold perhaps???It wasn’t until the afternoon that I took a rapid test. When the bright pink line appeared, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Some days later, my husband succumbed, a reverse birthday present, the kind about which one wants to say, “no thanks; I think I’ll pass.”

After some fumbles (doctor not in the office; prescription called in to a pharmacy that didn’t carry it; torrential rain) I got my Paxlovid prescription. Days later, it was my husband’s turn to fall ill. But it was a weekend, and because of ongoing staff shortages, there wasn’t a doctor to be found. A very aggressive internet search by the now-less-symptomatic household member (me) turned up a clinic with weekend appointments, testing capacity, and no authorization required by a primary care physician. Success. Paxlovid prescription number two.

We both felt quite well on day five but four days later, in sequence, we were back in the soup. It took me two weeks to test negative after my rebound, so all in all, I spent three weeks at home during the Christmas and New Year holidays. Between the two of us, it was nearly a month. I am supremely grateful that neither of us has long COVID – my great fear and a vastly under-valued ongoing challenge of COVID for far too many. So in the grand scheme of things, and in comparison with what it would have been like two years ago and is like for those less lucky than we were, it wasn’t bad.??But it was still bad.

I understand the weariness with COVID, but I still have trouble understanding why people don't take completely simple, commonsense precautions to protect themselves and others – wearing masks in crowded (and often unventilated) indoor locations, using rapid tests before visiting others (especially vulnerable others), staying home when sick, and for their own sake, learning about antivirals that might protect them (although rebounds are annoying, Paxlovid has been shown to reduce long COVID by 25%). There is, in my opinion, way too much resistance to these exceedingly simple things. The larger issue of ventilating the spaces in which we, and our children and grandchildren, spend most of our time (think schools, among other things), is a government-level problem that shows no signs of being addressed. First-time infections, when they resolve, can be uncomfortable and inconvenient, to say the least. While hybrid immunity (vaccines + infection) provides real protection for some time, repeat infections, when they do occur, may put all of us at risk in ways that we don’t, as yet, fully understand.

Guardian columnist George Mobiot puts very differently the question about freedom that has plagued our COVID response from the start.??He asks, “Do we really mean to sit and watch as this infection encroaches on our freedom to be well?”?I like that: freedom to be well. Not freedom to do whatever I want regardless of the cost to others, but freedom for all of us to be well and live our lives to the fullest. What that means, though, is not giving up on the collective idea that what I do has an impact on others, what they do has an impact on me, and that real freedom emerges from mutuality and solidarity, not from ignoring what we don’t want to see.?

A FOLLOW-UP note to the above. Today, the Biden administration announced that the coronavirus public health emergency will expire in May. Among other things, this will eliminate free testing, free vaccines for those without insurance, free anti-virals, research on advanced vaccines, and more. Five-hundred deaths a day, or over 180,000 a year (at least triple a bad year of the seasonal flu), seems to be something we have agreed to accept.