The virus, five years on

      On March 13, 2020, five years ago, the U.S. government declared a nationwide emergency because of a new viral disease starting to spread across the country. The virus was called severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2. The disease was called COVID-19, the number for the year in which it was discovered.

      Most of us just called it Covid, and it has changed our lives like perhaps nothing else in our memory.

      It is up there with what had been perhaps the defining moment for our generation, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is there with the attacks of 9/11. It is, like them, a before-and-after moment, an axis, where almost nothing was as it previously had been.  

      Covid altered the world, transformed our country and particularly changed our generation. According to the most recent statistics, nearly 25 percent of those who died in this country from Covid—a quarter of a million individuals—were from our generation.

      Many of us know people who succumbed to the virus. Many of us—most—have been sickened by it, some made very sick. Some still are sick, suffering from long Covid. Some of us are still getting sick, even today, spending weeks coughing or feverish or both.

      And even if we were not infected, we all were affected by Covid.

      For weeks and months beginning that March, we didn’t leave the house. (If we tentatively ventured outside to get the mail, we let it sit on a table for hours because, remember, we didn’t want to touch it.)

      We didn’t see—except on a screen—many outside our immediate families. Instead of getting together with colleagues or friends, we Zoomed. We didn’t go in to offices for months on end. And many of us have never gone back.      

      Our kids or grandkids didn’t go to school. Graduation parties and weddings and reunions were called off. Family gatherings never happened. We isolated ourselves, burrowing into our Netflix and doomscrolling on our phones. We were home alone.

      If we could, we had supermarkets deliver our groceries because we wouldn’t risk shopping ourselves. We didn’t go out to dinner or lunch and had doubts about delivery because who would be touching our food before it got to us?

      Our choices meant urban centers were deserted, office buildings emptied. Favorite restaurants or shops closed.

      We didn’t travel, obviously. My wife and I were scheduled for a photographic safari in southern Africa. We were supposed to leave in September 2020. We canceled and rescheduled for … September 2021.

      We never went.

      When we did finally venture out of our homes or apartments, we looked for the X that marked the spot that was six feet away from the next X. We stocked up on masks, where we could find them, and when we did finally venture out, we only did it with KN-95s or N-95s, our faces half obscured. Many of us still wear masks when out in public or in crowded spaces. Many of us still look for restaurants with outdoor patios.

      When vaccines started to become available, miraculously quickly, we speed-dialed or speed-clicked to get an appointment. Our generation, among the most susceptible to the virus, was the one that vaccinated most. To get my first two shots, I twice drove 90 minutes southeast to a clinic that finally had an open slot. I was grateful.

      Now, the craziness of that time seems almost distant. In 2020, at the height of the fear, the pandemic might have been the reason Trump lost the election. In 2024, our having forgotten about what happened, may have been one of the reasons he won.

      That is, for the most part, we’ve moved on, and hardly talk about the disease or the people who died or who got really sick or the way it all transformed us. But Covid’s after-effects—on how we live, how we work, how we vote, who we voted for, how we trust institutions and much more—still linger, and will for a very long time.