Going viral
Four years ago, when it became clear that the pandemic was going to close down the world, during the final face-to-face meeting in March, students had questions in plenty, from arrangements for the final exams, to whether they would be able to come back to the dorms.
I told them to pack up everything they possibly could and take with them as much as they could because they might not get back to campus for a very long time. Not that I knew for certain, but my informed guess was that residential college life was going to be suspended for a while.
A few students thanked me for my clear and direct response. Apparently the administrative emails to them were far from clear and direct. Their facial expressions and body language broke my heart. “Keep calm and carry on” was one of the many clichés that I shared with them during that meeting.
I never had much stuff in my office and, so, needed very little time to pack my stuff. I left campus. That was March 2020. After that life was all virtual, until I returned to the campus in Fall 2021 for the final term of my academic career. Under the terms of the layoff notice, I was done teaching in December 2021. In 2022, I became a pensioner.
We learnt new vocabulary. “Social distancing” was a big one. A magical six feet marker. Why six? Why not five or seven?
I think the scientists picked up the number from another old usage in the vocabulary: Six feet under. They guessed that if we didn’t want to go six feet under, then we better keep at least six feet distance from each other. The grocery store that I went to today has circles that say “stand here” and the circles are six feet apart. Remnants from the horrors past.
Don’t touch surfaces and then touch your face they said. Like many, I actively washed my hands or used a hand sanitizer. I distinctly recall the time that I pushed open the gate at the neighborhood, exited, closed the gate, and then scratched my itchy beard. Panic set in that I maybe had sent the germs into my system.
And then they told us to wear masks. Quilters quickly pivoted to making masks. We non-quilters received masks quilted made by friends and siblings and siblings of friends.
They said we had to keep even more distance, more than six feet, from runners and bicyclists when out on the bike path because of their hard breathing that could send out explosions of germs. I often turned my head away if I saw a runner approaching me from behind and got ready to hold my breath as the runner passed me.
Stores ran out of toilet paper. Who would have ever imagined that the mighty USA, which used to make fun of sandpaper-like toilet paper in the old Soviet bloc, would one day have nothing but empty shelves in the stores as if we had become a Soviet bloc country.
Allergy season began and now I wasn’t sure if the sniffling was from allergies or from the coronavirus. It was like I was a contestant in a game show every day, playing the game “Allergy or Coronavirus?”
A neighbor who is much older than me reported taking her temperature every day even when she felt normal. There was panic in the streets.
(Well into the pandemic, when we watched plenty of movies at home in order to kill time, one of the movies we watched was Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets”. That was rough!)
We began to appreciate the importance of statistics. We parsed through infection rates, hospitalization rates, fatality rates, and hoped that we would not become data.
Four years have gone by.
Yet, it is deja vu all over again. The former President wants to become the next president.
The rapist who was in the Oval Office when the pandemic began, holds huge rallies yelling and screaming that life was better four years ago under his leadership. Of course, he has never operated in the reality that most of us do. But, really, have that man and his tens of millions of supporters forgotten life that was in most of 2020? He asked us to drink bleach to fight the virus, for crying out loud! He wanted to shine a light in the intestines. He recommended that we take a horse de-wormer paste to treat the infection. All those things were better than life now in 2024?
Public memory is notoriously short, in contrast to the “don’t forget/don’t forgive” bottom-line of mine. How good is your memory? Was life better four years ago?