Sunday, March 7, 2021

1 year of life in the COVID World.

1 year ago today, I was at Great Dane Hilldale with a group of friends having our typical great time at Bockfest. We were crowded into the Dane, mostly in the back bar, as numerous brewers were set up so you could use your glass to sample. There also was a pretzel bar that you could serve yourself from, and plenty of sharing was going on.

On the TV, we were watching Badger basketball finish up an 8-game winning streak, and clinching a Big Ten title that seemed impossible a month priot to that. And doing it in front of a full crowd at Indiana, and then being greeted by fans back at the Kohl Center later that afternoon. It feels like a scene that happened a decade ago in a very different country. We were aware of a "coronavirus" that had come over from China and was hitting some people in Seattle. But that was 2,000 miles away and it wasn't going to do anything to us, so it was business as usual on that Saturday.

I worked in the office the following week, although we were starting to get recommendations that we use sanitizer and limit hand contact. And then Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz and actor couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were reported to have the virus on Wednesday, but my wife and my wife's aunt all went out to dinner the next night. We knew things were on the path to shutting down, for a little bit anyway.

Then on Friday, we headed down to Chicago to fly out for our annual trip to a Mexico timeshare on Saturday. O'Hare was jammed that morning with Spring Breakers, and we talked with people in the airport about what might be happening as we adjusted to the virus, including a couple of UW-Madison students who were also flying to Mexico, and how the school was planning to deal with classes coming back. They had ideas about online courses to finish up the year, but it was still in flux.

In the airport, we saw a few people in masks (mostly Asian), but nothing was very different beyond groups starting to space themselves a bit. We got into Mexico, got through customs, and figured we were fine since it was open air and warm. And we saw the resort clear out in real time over that week. From near-typically filled to (at best) 20% of typical capacity, with areas closing as the days went on.

March Madness, which is a near-holiday for me, got canceled. The great run that Badger hoops was on got slammed shut, without us being allowed to see how that would have ended up. It was frustrating, but we figured as long as we locked ourselves down for a few weeks and played smart, we'd return to normal by the time classes were back in session at UW-Madison that September.

And now here we are a year later, over 527,000 dead and 29 million infected in the US, and 2.5 million worldwide. Economically, our country has 9.5 million fewer jobs than we had 12 months ago.
We still aren't crowding into the Dane for Bockfest, or pretty much any other bar or inside dining establishment.
I'm one of the lucky ones. My wife and I not only kept our jobs, but we were able to work those jobs from our home, and neither of us have been hit by the virus as we have generally kept our distance, masked up, and limited our exposure. But what a waste, and we're not going to get back the lost travel and experiences that have happened in the 12 months we have lived in the COVID World.

And much of this damage and waste was preventable, if we only had a government that saw the virus as a disease that needed to be overcome by a great collective effort. Instead Trump/GOP saw it as something that affected "other people", and only cared about it as far as it affected their chances of being re-elected (and being immune...from prosecution).

With a vaccine available, it does seem that we will see some kind of fading of the COVID World in the coming months. But we will not be the same, the way we operate will not return to pre-COVID "normal", and it's not something we should ever forget about.
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