Pandemic Reflection

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

For me, the pandemic started four years ago, so time to reflect a bit on what’s gone on.

The beginning

Four years ago this month in December of 2019, my now late wife was learning that the brand of mechanical insulin injectors she was using were no longer available, and she was investigating why. It seems that these injectors were being manufactured in Wuhan province in China, and that there was the beginnings of a pandemic which had numerous manufacturing plants shut down due to quarantine (the US company that sold the devices eventually went bankrupt as a result). Now we had experienced a pandemic directly before, after I got swine flu in 2009 about a month before a vaccine was available (my wife never caught it), and during that time to protect family and friends we self-quarantined. As people who had experienced extended power outages and/or inconveniences from winters, tornado damage, and other things we tended to buy in bulk and always had extra supplies. Being a forward thinker and natural risk assessor herself, my wife looked at this outbreak in Wuhan province, went to Amazon and ordered a bunch of N95 masks, “just in case.” A few other things were also added to the list as well, it wouldn’t hurt to have extra of a few things. In other words, we were prepared. I work in Infosec and deal with risk assessment all the time - I deemed this both appropriate and smart. It was also a little foretelling.

I was scheduled to speak at Shmoocon 16 which took place January 31st through February 2nd of 2020. Discussing the situation with my wife, we knew that this pandemic would spread via international travel, so we discussed it, and I masked up while at the airports and on aircraft (but not the con itself). I got a few odd looks but then again it was not rare to see at least someone else masked up during travel events - usually during flu season.

The Unfolding

Shortly after my return trip from Shmoocon we started limiting our heading out, and quickly began our personal quarantine. My first visit to the grocery store (and the main contributor to the decision to get groceries delivered) was absolutely surreal. There was in essence a “run” on the stores as groceries were out of toilet paper, paper towels, wipes and other cleaning products. In the deli there were limits on the amounts of meats one could get. Many people were used to heading out to grab a quick lunch bite somewhere close to the office, maybe stopping and picking up some dinner for the family on the commute home, and now they were desperately trying to stock their empty shelves at home. There was panic, there was yelling, there was loud complaining to no one in particular about empty shelves in the grocery store. I felt lucky since we had already stocked up out of habit as we usually did. I also felt lucky because we had an empty nest and I already worked from home so the around-the-house lifestyle didn’t change at all. We just ate more meals at home.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

The Current State

I’ve previously talked about my feelings on the pandemic fairly early on, and reading back through it I realize how like everyone I just assumed there would be a vaccine and it would eventually be over fairly quickly - like the swine flu. Instead we’re at nearly 7 million deaths and counting, and I know at this point of a dozen people that are family, friends, or at least online acquaintances that were impacted by long covid (some still are and have been for over a year). It saddens me that this is the case, and it saddens me even further that if everyone had simply masked and self-quarantined world wide for 3-4 weeks this entire thing would have ended in 2020 instead of being what it is today.

Apparently though, like seemingly everything in this politically divisive world we live in, if one side says one thing, the other side seems to take the opposite side even if that flies in the face of logic. There were people that thought all vaccines were bad, and figured herd immunity would play this out. Seems crazy now, but remember there was and is plenty of crazy going on: Covid vaccines were some sort of excuse by the Powers That Be to inject chips into you, 5G was some type of evil conspiracy, the earth was really flat, and all kinds of other batshit crazy theories out there - so it only seemed inevitable that whiney people tired of isolation and quarantine would slowly begin acting like the pandemic was over. The emergency part of the pandemic is over - in that we all know about it and there are various vaccines that cover most of the variants out there. But the pandemic itself is still here, still mutating, still deadly, still impacting lives.

Moving Forward

There is hope - nasal spray vaccines are in development. As the work on these continue, there is hope that since the main vector for Covid-19 attack is an airborne vector, this would react quicker and more effectively, and have the side benefit of potentially addressing multiple and even unknown variants.

Life continues on. During this time amongst my family and friends I’ve seen death, new life, marriages, and plenty of change. Right now I do think with vaccines this pandemic will eventually end, and despite all of the political strife and climate issues (which I also have hope for) I think things will settle down a bit. Fingers crossed.