It is hard to believe we are in March of 2021 already. It is also hard to believe we are approaching a year of the pandemic. Some people have already marked the first year, depending what their marker is. For me, it is the week the schools closed in March. That’s when my family’s world shifted.
My daughter was home every day. My husband switched to working from home. I had to figure out how to snag a spot for grocery pickup (it was as bad as trying to get a vaccine appointment for a while). Everything stopped, but at the same time the change was moving at lightspeed. Life became disorienting and stressful, with even minor things that had been on autopilot now taking a great deal of conscious thought.
Now we are about a year in. Vigilance is still necessary, but we have learned. We have learned what activities are safe, what risks we are willing to take (this differs from person to person), what precautions to ingrain in our habits. Will I ever be able to feel comfortable standing closer than 6 feet from someone again? How weird will it be to someday be able to leave the masks at home, gathering dust in a drawer?
The stress has morphed throughout the year. It started as near-panic, and the steep learning curve of living in our new reality. As we got used to working from home, learning from home, shopping from home, zooming from home, the stress became a steady thrum of “stay safe” in the background of our lives. We learned to deal with too much togetherness and too little emotional and mental space. Creatives either saw their Muses flourish, or saw them flee (mine fled). And losing one’s creative outlet is another kind of stress.
Finally, we are at the beginning of the end of the pandemic, and the stress has shifted again. Now the scarcity of vaccines is causing stress as people scramble to get their loved ones protected. We spend hours on sites trying to snag appointments that disappear as fast as concert tickets on Ticketmaster. And we brace ourselves against pandemic fatigue, the very real desire to just toss all precautions to the wind and forget for a while.
But we cannot let down our guard. The pandemic is not over, it is not done, and it will find those moments of forgetfulness and gleefully infect a new batch of people—perhaps creating a new and deadlier variant in the process. We must stand strong for a while longer. Just a few more months, then we can perhaps breathe easier without worrying what respiratory droplets we are breathing in. We will not achieve full return to normalcy in a few months, but we should be much closer. We should be in the middle of the end of the pandemic.
So in the meantime, I am simply marching on. I am distracting myself with my genealogy work. Today I have spent a long time with 9th- to 11th-century Norwegian Jarls of Orkney and the Norse Dukes of Normandy. All I can say is that with all the fighting warring, and raiding everyone did back then, it’s a wonder any of us are here at all.
So as I march with them into their next battle, I urge us all not to give up our current battle. The vaccine cavalry, with all its delivery flaws, has arrived, but the war is far from won. Stay strategic. Stay strong. Stay safe.
I want all of us to be here a year from now, when the end of the end of this pandemic will be behind us.
Hold the Line—CoronaLife Day 376
Sometimes in life you can feel change coming. It comes slowly, inching along…until all of a sudden it flips, and it’s like you are rolling downhill. I feel rather like that with this virus right now. We have a vaccine, people are taking it…but I’m not seeing any effect.
Case rates are at best plateaued where I live, at worst climbing a bit. We are at a transmission rate of 1.09, when we need to be below one, ideally closer to 0.8. We have gotten a second case of Covid in our school (thankfully only 2 since all this began), just as we are all hoping for things to get better. I feel that we are at a tipping point…but I’m not sure which way we will fall.
Honestly, I was hoping to see a greater impact from the vaccinations at this point. And maybe that’s just me not understanding how this all works. Maybe the plateau is because of the vaccines. I was hoping, though, to see a steady decrease in cases as the vaccination rate went up.
Now, the vaccines were not tested to see if they stopped transmission, and with the new variants that are more contagious, maybe the transmission rate is higher than expected. The vaccines WERE intended to decrease hospitalizations and deaths, but both of those are lagging indicators, and I don’t expect to see impact from them for a while.
But I also feel like people have given up, have stopped taking precautions. Like, “The vaccine is here, and so is spring, so let’s just pretend everything is normal.” And that might be one reason why the cases aren’t going down.
We need to hold the line.
I know people are sick of it. I am sick of it, exhausted of the precautions and the remote learning and not seeing my parents often. I get it. We’re tired and we’re fed up.
But we need to hold the line—just for a few more weeks.
We are at the tipping point in this fight. But the vaccines aren’t a cure-all, they were never meant to be a silver bullet, and we all still have to do our part. Even after we’re vaccinated. If we can hold the line just a little longer, we will tip this thing in our favor.
For all that lots of people are being vaccinated, many of us aren’t eligible yet. I won’t be for possibly another month or more. And none of our kids are, and probably won’t be until fall.
So please, for me, for my kid, hold the line just a little longer. Wear the mask. Keep the distance. Stay home as much as possible. The longer people ignore the precautions, the longer the end of this will take to arrive.
We’re so close.
Just hold the line.