Covid-19: The first year, some personal recollections
Four years ago, as Covid-19 strangled all of our ‘business as usual’ notions, there still seems a national PTSD. We all have our stories.
I decided to use my time ‘in quarantine’ 2020-21 to sort through and label over 20,000 photos then-and-still stored on my computer. Most photos were unlabeled. (Most were digital, and I hadn’t noted in some cases, who or what they showed. The digital ones were date-stamped, of course, so I could identify most.)
It was a lot of work, but I got the file essentially up to date…through 2019. But I continued to take pictures, and fell into the same old habits of not finishing the task of labeling.
This past Wednesday I started again. This time it was easier, and the first day I did 2020, the first year of the Pandemic, and at this writing I’m through mid-2021. In this post I want to briefly translate my first 12 months in the Pandemic, through the photos I reviewed, and perhaps jog you to do something similar from your own perspective.
We’ve all lived through an immensely significant time in our history, with lessons hopefully learned from this awful experience. We’re not out of the now-four-year-war….
*
I archive all of my posts, which are all word-searchable. The first post I did on Covid-19 was dated March 6, 2020, and can be read here.
What follows is completely jogged by my own personal photos. and speaks for itself. Everyone has differing memories of course. Maybe something I write will jog something in you.
Here goes:
By March, 2020, it had become undeniable that something very unpleasant was evolving in our world. My first personal memory – my personal first notice – was the news of the Nursing Home deaths in Washington state. My total ‘normal’ daily world was upended almost overnight. At first, there was no public alarm. The first reports were perhaps two cases in Minnesota. It turned out one of these was from a nearby suburb, but of course this wasn’t mentioned at the time. But concern began to increase.
March 15 I went to church as usual, and ushered It was a rather sparsely attended service. At the end of Mass, the Priest announced that there would be no more Masses open to the public. At the back of the church I took a photo of assorted disinfecting items. At the time, no one knew exactly what we were dealing with. But we were rapidly coming to know it was deadly. Places like Italy and suburban New York City were harbingers.
I had planned a breakfast meeting with a friend on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17. We were to meet at a pancake house, which was supposed to be open. My friend drove by and found that they wouldn’t be open for breakfast. So the ‘official’ start of the Pandemic for me was St. Patrick’s Day.
March 20 was when ‘normal’ ended for everyone in Minnesota, and we weren’t alone.
*
I am a creature of habit, which created the necessity of adjusting to a new reality. I began a daily practice of taking a photo or two of some evidence of life as it was evolving.
April 7 I photographed a chalked message on the sidewalk of my walking route: “Smile. We Will Get Through this Together.” It was a nice touch. But even walkers were sparse, and most were masked, and gave lots of space.
April 22, I saw the first leaves of spring – a bush – and I took a photo of it. It’s in the photo file.
April 23, a young woman friend of the family turned 21, and the family celebration was outside with lots of social distancing. It was a unique gathering, which became common. In this time frame I recall seeing a Memorial Service on a lawn for someone who had died. I had begun a practice of one or two brief solitary drives each day to dull cabin fever.
By May 2, I knew my 80th birthday on May 4 would be a private affair, and I took a picture of the street sign at 80th Street South in the adjacent suburb of Cottage Grove. A resident nearby was clearly suspicious of why I was taking the picture. “I’m turning 80” was satisfactory for him, I guess.
Schools were closed, and on May 9 a local Middle School where my daughter is Principal had a Drive-by, where school staff waved to the students and parents driving by – sort of a parade. Now, there is a Covid generation of kids, and the process of recovery is slow. But it would have been insane to keep the schools open back then.
I did one screen shot of the first zoom meeting I was part of. Another big adjustment.
By Mid-May, 2020, I had completely abandoned my outdoor walks. Even walkers, even social distance, seemed not enough for some walkers I met. It was a paranoid time. I began doing ‘sanity drives’ a couple of times a day: just nearby places I’d not seen, no more than a few miles. I got to know places like Newport, Grey Cloud Island, old Cottage Grove, and the like. All solitary visits in a car. Often I’d stop to get takeout coffee at my Caribou Coffee – there was no indoor seating, takeout only.
The evening of May 29, my friends restaurant, Gandhi Mahal, was burned to the ground in south Minneapolis, one of the last acts of violence in the wake of the May 25 murder of George Floyd. To this day, the block on which the restaurant had stood has not been rebuilt, except the U.S. Post Office. The Surveillance Camera was burned along with the building, and no one has been arrested. Four years later, there remain significant residual effects of that awful week. This was face-mask time, so perpetrators of this wanton violence were most likely masked, and only have their conscience as punishment.
June 3, 2020: the school year had been totally upset all Spring. My daughter is Principal of a large Middle School, and I saw this in her office when I stopped in for a brief visit. I gathered most school management was by laptop….
June 3, 2020 Oltman Middle School
June 7, grandson Parker graduated from high school. It was a most unusual graduation – students made appointments to come, one at a time, to receive their diploma. On the 12th, grandson Ben turned 15. There were occasional other similar events, all outdoors.
August 12 I took a screen shot on the television of the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris candidacy for President.
September 19 I saw a sign at Basilica announcing that people could come to Mass, but needed to pre-register. I gather one per pew was normal density, possible exception: couples. Few attended, I think. The church ventilation system had been upgraded, and a new on-line televised Mass initiated, which continues to this day.
October 2, I took a screen shot of the President being taken by helicopter to Walter Reed Hospital for treatment of Covid; October 6, another screen shot of the defiant President back at the White House. All stops had been pulled to save his life, I gathered. (For the rest of us, see February 4, below).
November 7, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were elected. Another screen shot.
January 6, 2021, I took 32 screen shots of the riot at the U.S. Capitol – the first at 2 pm. the last at 3:07 p.m. Central Time. I watched the entire spectacle in stunned silence.
January 17, I took a screen shot of heavy security gathering at the Minnesota State Capitol in the event of some demonstration there. I don’t think a lot transpired, but there was fear of violence.
January 19, a screen shot that Covid-19 had tallied 400K deaths, and 24.2 M cases (400,000 and 24.2 million).
January 20 screen shots of the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President and Vuce-President of the United States.
I got my first vaccine, February 4, 2021. The clinic was very well organized. Since, have had 6 rounds, and am pending a 7th soon. I was pretty diligent with masking through the first year; and some habits, like social-distancing in lines, are positive residual habits.
February 9, the 2nd impeachment of the past president began.
February 27, 2021: back in restaurant. Life returning to normal, but lots of after-effects.
*
April 6, 2024: To date, we’ve avoided the virus, without becoming hermits, but we’ve been careful. The disease to now has taken over 1,000,000 American lives….
I tend to be an optimist. I think enough of us have possibly learned a thing or two from the catastrophe which we experienced four years ago. A primary re-learning for myself is that every single one of us on the globe is an interdependent part of a massive community. We can’t survive by our own individual wits. It is too easy to get careless, to not learn from mistakes, to pretend we can do this on our own. I wish us well.
POSTNOTE: Reflections after Easter post, here. Today is the local Senate District Democratic Convention. I’m a delegate, and will write about that later.
COMMENTS below
Thanks for doing this post. I’m sure it took some time to pull it all together. My memory was jogged regarding many events experienced during the pandemic. The idea early on in the pandemic that “we’re all in this together” seems quaint now. I’m not quite as optimistic as you regarding the future. For many, I think the main “lesson” learned was that all the mitigation done during the pandemic was a waste of time and just made things worse. The “liberals” were just trying to take away “our freedom.” Combine those views with the much larger (and growing) anti-vax group and I think we’ll be in much deeper trouble if/when the next pandemic comes around.
I generally agree with your comment and made a small change in one paragraph to reflect what I think is reality, the “enough of us” make for possibility of a better future. Of course this is just my guess, and backsliding is easy. While there remains a great abundance of dismal behavior, the “tone” I see in my every day life seems more positive – as the “be kind” pillow suggests. We all need to keep working the program, however, for longer term success.
Thank you Dick. It is good to remember our history. We continue to be living in a critical and life-changing time.
Apart from restrictions and a Covid Life style, I now reflect on COVID’s death, illness, and isolation, I find myself thankfully, again enjoying the simple things.
One shift that I am still trying to sort out is church attendance and the impact of “on-line worship” in America. As for me, being in attendance is an experience I am unwilling to forfeit. The PEW Research Group has studied this for years in an often cited study of religion in America.
January 6 is real in our family. A relative was in the Capitol that day. You may have seen him on television. He was “at risk” wearing SWAT TEAM gear. His honorable duty that day, has solidified my views on the insurrection.
I now shop at what I remember as “honorable” merchants. I remember some vendors with signs on the door stating “masks required”; and lack of enforcement inside.” We have parted ways.
As I see things, Rabbi Zimmerman has been a gift to our city. Her wisdom, and views have always been insightful.
There will be much more to say on Gaza.
I must now turn to reading a review copy of a book on French Americans. [Mark Labine] has been diligently at work and has completed some important work on a current study. I suggest you continue to become aware of his recent work.
Have a meaningful week, Dick.
Rich Hahn
I appreciate your ‘look-back’ to the Covid era + (BC/AC)! I’m encouraging folks -especially those who are on the fence about ‘2 elders’ running for presidency of the US 2024-2028… to remember how each candidate handled or didn’t handle the Covid crises. Do we want to live under the chaos, uncertainty and needless deaths caused by the way Covid was not handled by the former president/his administration? Or, do we vote to live with an administration who handled the Covid crisis in an orderly way…bringing our country and world into a better reality we see today? To me, the choice is clear. We can’t let our national collective amnesia of just a few short years ago, distort the sobering choice we will make as we vote up and down ballot in the 2024 election.
Thanks to all for your views, especially Brother Dick. My husband Carter and I spent 3 years of covid as isolated as we could from all but our daughter-in-law and her very vulnerable parents at their home. We’ve never had a positive diagnosis of covid and will continue followup as available. Remember how our parents handled polio! Our family of seven stayed healthy.
Dick, I thought I’d chime in, only because my thoughts and feelings on this are so strong AND so different from those already expressed. So here goes:
I too was an early “true believer” in what the authorities told us about Covid and how to minimize its impact. I feel truly betrayed. Not because they were wrong so much early on – this was new, and a lot was unknown. I’m a retired research scientist. I get it. Some early decisions that now just look foolish were driven by caution in an environment lacking in actual knowledge. But as time went on, those entrusted to inform us and keep us as safe, in ALL ways, as possible, repeatedly lied to us when they thought that “we couldn’t handle the truth”. They seem to have concluded that, given the real info, and left to our own decision-making, we would make the “wrong” ones. Which in some cases would have actually been the right ones. I’m thinking the CDC. I’m thinking the Walz administration. I’m thinking, yes, Dr. Fauci – though I really do tire of the right-wing’s demonization of him. He was no worse than many others in this regard. If he thought that we’d do the “wrong things” if we knew what he knew, he hid things, he obfuscated, or he just lied. Numerous times. But, though it’s not really an excuse, he can honestly say that “everybody (in epidemiology) was doing it!” We will literally be at it for generations trying to get over the distrust of once-trusted parts of government and research-academia that was caused by their own actions during Covid.
I was one of the “religious” maskers, not realizing then, as we now know (and the CDC did even then), that even a good cloth mask was next to useless, and, living as I do in very Progressive-dominated South Minneapolis, the social pressure was immense to conform and grew more so as time wore on. I remember, though, how reassuring it was, during the earliest weeks, and then again a few months after peak crisis, to visit Mahtomedi, where I have some connections. In that “purple” community, which regards itself (absurdly, in my opinion) to be “exurban” or even “nearly rural”, and thus, attitudinally, very different from my Minneapolis or your Woodbury, any place where mask wearing was not legally mandated, and aggressively enforced, it was hard to find anyone wearing one. I wore mine while there anyway, once taking note that I was the only non-employee in a supermarket wearing one. But I felt oddly good that here were generally-well-informed middle-class people (like me!) who were not so living-in-fear as I was – even if my own fear was more fear of peer disapproval than fear of the disease. I know from many conversations then, and since, that this was a common difference then between metro life and MN non-metro life. Since I did no real travel during Covid, only that weird “pseudo-rural” sense of so many in Mahtomedi allowed me to experience this first hand. I am glad I could and did.
By the way, for all the religiosity of my mask wearing, WFH [Work From Home], isolation, social distancing when “out”, etc., I “only” caught “Delta” once (Aug’20) in spite of having been a pioneer in having already caught “original strain” at 3M (presumably from one of the dozens of China travelers in my building), in Feb.’20, before WFH, lockdowns, etc. …a few days before Seattle, NYC, and Italy. Second time was not as bad an experience as first (which was the worst flu-like malady I’d EVER had, and very unique – until the second one, which was very similar but less intense). Presumably I had even more resistance the second time conferred from the first. But, as we now know, neither a cloth mask nor distancing at the too-short length recommended at the time, was worth much of anything, protection-wise. I caught Delta while “doing all the right things”. I suspect many others did so too.
Covid was, and, to a lesser extent, still is, one weird disease. I do not make light of it as a disease. My brother works in a machine shop in the Chicago suburbs. You may not think of machinists as “essential workers”, but they can’t WFH. In summer ’20, he, and his brother-in-law, caught Covid from another machinist in the shop (we know because everyone was tested and only these three were positive). My brother had symptoms. From what I gather, a little worse than my first time, but not bad enough to require hospitalization. He isolated in his own bedroom for something like two weeks. His wife left food at the door and went downstairs. She slept in the living room. The original guy had no symptoms whatsoever. We only know he was the likely source because my bro and his in-law were isolating in life, other than to come to work, and no one else at work tested positive but these three. The brother-in-law? He died. Three grown (but not senior citizen) men. No symptoms; Some symptoms; Death. Covid was like that. Some day, we may understand, genetically or otherwise, WHY it was like that. What we know today is that very many of the extreme and costly measures we took had little to do with who caught it, and who made it through, or did not.
Regarding businesses that were persnickety about masks and those that weren’t – I have the opposite sense of another of your Commenters. I too, took notes (literally – on my iPhone), and I patronize to this day businesses that allowed people to just be, whether or not they posted a mask “request”. On the other hand, I have only recently stopped actually boycotting the ones who insisted on, and enforced, “masks for all” WAY past when it was time to move on. There is an art gallery in Mpls., which shall remain nameless, that didn’t move on until late last summer… Seriously. That’s my milieu.
In terms of “next time”, I am most concerned that we have changed nothing in laws or the regulatory environment that will prevent the over-reach that so many units of government engaged in. I’ll probably keep voting for him (though perhaps not if he’s ever in a contested DFL primary…), but I’ll never again be able to stop thinking of Walz by the sarcastic nickname I gave him back then: “Emperor Timmy, The All-Knowing and All-Powerful”. It is hard for me to fully trust him, or to take him seriously as a wise decision-maker.
I don’t think it’s particularly useful, especially with all else that is available to us, to even consider Covid performance as a differentiator between Trump and Biden. The crisis “just happened” to Trump, and among those in the non-partisan parts of government (such as CDC middle management), he was no further than anyone else from correctly assessing the level of threat. He was no different in degree or direction in the opening days and weeks, and then erred in the opposite direction from so many others in government later. With his Operation Warp Speed, he essentially did the “politics” part of solving the largest part of the problem that fate had dropped on him, and we really should give the son-of-a-bitch credit for that, because credit is due. All that was before letting his own ham-handedness and the ham-handedness of others in both his administration and many state governments turn the whole thing into a partisan issue. Your former State Rep. JoAnn Ward always used to tell me that the route to getting anything done in the (then-divided) MN state government was to present an idea as non-partisan and then work like hell to keep it that way. Allowed to become partisan, the idea was dead. ALL our politicians, left and right, Dem/DFL and GOP, allowed that form of “idea death” to happen during Covid. It was a shame, and it was shameful that they did it. All of them.
Biden, on the other hand, inherited a “problem” well on its way to solution, and didn’t shepherd us on that course any better than I’d have expected any office holder to, and in some ways was disappointing early on. One example: Not doing more than he did to use the “bully pulpit” to encourage more rapid reopening of schools early on was hugely damaging to America and especially to our children. So, I see Covid as one of the few areas where neither of them did well enough – or poorly enough – to applaud one over the other. We’ve got much better reasons to prefer Joe Biden to Trump, and I hope we don’t campaign AT ALL on this one.
To Jim:
I guess I’d qualify as a WFH (work from home) though I’ve been retired 24 years. My “office” has been Caribou Coffee in early morning since 2000. There was a grieving period when it closed its doors to sit-down folks like me in March 2020, and it stayed closed for a long time, though we could, and I did, take out. So,my alternative was solitary drives a couple of times a day, just to get out.
Back then, it early on became clear to me that nobody knew for sure what to do. Disasters don’t come with instruction books. I concluded that the virus wasn’t like a mosquito or something, that you could see and swat, but I did what I could to minimize the risk, without isolating. I wore the mask, but didn’t swear by it – after all, you can breathe through it! Other critters can get in! To this day I do adopt the social distance rule that I learned, and I note many others do as well.
I was close to first in line when the vaccine came available in 2021, which was near a year into the pandemic. All was very orderly.
As for the lawmakers, Walz et al, I cut them a lot of slack. The rabble that is all of us has infinite notions of what should or should not be done, as do their advisors and experts, and the odds are certain that bad political decisions are made, in good faith. The former President is a separate category.
School kids have not recovered from the year WFH; on the other hand, political pressure from all sides by parents, and the risks of doing nothing, mitigate against finding lots of fault there. One daughter is a Middle School principal, another a Middle School teacher, so I know the stories.
There will be future crises. We Americans are not prone to learn a lot from our missteps. We seem to be individualists. We are part of a global society and can’t isolate, as we found out.
Anyway, we march on.
Thanks for the comment.