The New Pandemic

I made it for nearly four years, then the cold that started on February 15 shifted. My sense of smell had diminished, as had my sense of taste. I woke up on the 19th feeling a heaviness in my chest. A rapid test confirmed my fear: I had finally gotten COVID.

Since March of 2020, I had been a relatively diligent mask user and social distancer; I masked in public spaces, avoided going out unnecessarily, didn’t spend time with anyone without wearing a mask and maintaining six feet apart. Being self-employed for more than a decade, I had a daily routine that played to my personal rhythms of productivity, and I laughed at all the folks freaking out over working from home. I didn’t have a car anymore, so I’d already been relying on grocery delivery via Amazon Fresh, online shopping, and an occasional Uber or Lyft for other tasks.

In those early days I watched local news briefings about COVID, taking notes in my planner. I looked at the numbers weekly, writing down the climbing death rates. I sewed cotton fabric masks, trying three different online patterns, ultimately making ones designed to hold a replaceable filter. On Facebook, I watched a physician friend’s aseptic cleaning techniques video, and I mixed up a CDC-approved bleach solution for disinfecting hard surfaces; once a week I donned a mask and gloves and sprayed down the handrails and doorknobs in the shared spaces of my apartment building. In December 2020, I got news that Pops’ cousin died from COVID complications.

When I first read about COVID symptoms of troubled breathing, I remembered getting pneumonia in the spring of 2003. What started out as a bad cold shifted into a hacking cough that would not go away. I sat in a hot bath, crying, because the tightness in my chest and inability to breathe scared me so much. I took myself to a local ER, where I was put in a bed and an IV drip started, a black curtain descending over my eyes as the antibiotic swam through my veins. I don’t remember much else except feeling incredibly alone, and how a friend who stopped by with groceries later told me, “You looked like you wanted to die.” The truth is that I did because I felt so awful. And after that spring, every cold or flu bug I caught had me frightened that I would get pneumonia if I didn’t take proper care of myself, including allowing other people to help me by bringing food or providing cat care. It wasn’t until COVID came to the United States in March of 2020 that I felt that same fear all over again.

From the beginning I viewed COVID as an apocalyptic event, akin to one of the zombie movies I detest. The virus was spreading rapidly, taking out wide swaths of people. There were arrogant deniers and asymptomatic carriers, all of them eventually succumbing to the coronavirus. Hiding in our houses with disinfectant and rolls of paper products could only keep us safe for so long. We’d venture out with homemade masks and precious rare N95s, antibacterial wipes and hand sanitizers in our pockets, avoiding contact with as many people as possible, giving dirty looks to the people exposing their nostrils out the top of their thin blue masks. Media pundits and politicians, virologists and armchair doctors, issued conflicting rallying cries: it’s just a cold! Continue masking and stay six feet away! It’s a biological weapon created by the Chinese! If you get sick, stay home and isolate!¹ The undercurrent was that by working together, we could eradicate the virus and end the pandemic.

I had misgivings about posting my COVID status on Facebook when I got the test results on February 19. If I hadn’t shared my status, I could have stayed blissfully unaware of the attitudes of people I know, people who got COVID more than once because of repeated exposure through their work or family members. I got comments from people who shrugged it off and told me I would be fine if I started Paxlovid, who told me how often they’d had COVID as if that made it okay. I felt as though many of them didn’t understand my rage and frustration over contracting COVID, the same virus responsible for the deaths of more than one million people in the United States alone. Many of these people had been just as diligent, maybe even more so, than I had been.

I spent a lot of the last week thinking about all of these things, getting angrier and more frustrated even as I choked down three antiviral drugs in one swallow and laid in bed binge-watching old TV shows. I felt guilty over all the times I hadn’t masked in a public setting, even when my intuition told me I should. I thought about what Dayna Lynn Nuckolls had said three years earlier, that survival is a shared burden.² And I thought about how much has been forgotten on a collective level, ushering us into a new pandemic of complacency. It’s this new pandemic that scares me even more, because its symptoms of indifference and nonchalance over a virus that killed more than 7 million people³ and continues to put people in the hospital are what got us here to begin with, four years ago.

1. Reference: https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2020/04/covid-top-10-current-conspiracy-theories/

2. Read Dayna’s January 2024 post here: https://thepeoplesoracle.com/2024-dont-let-them-make-you-forget/

3. Most recent COVID death data, worldwide: https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths?n=c

---