Giving thanks that we can beat COVID

My family used to take a long-weekend trip with another family every March. During our March 2020 trip, on our last day, we heard that schools would be closing for two weeks. A hard look at the tea leaves suggested that it would probably be longer. Knowing that we were facing an uncertain stretch where our children would not be seeing each other in school or at sports, and our casual get-togethers and carpooling and catch-up times in the driveway were going to be halted, we made a spur of the moment decision to take the long way home, stretching out the remaining hours before returning home to a quarantine.

We all know what happened next. Weeks turned into months, and months turned into more than a year. The disruptions were not to be contained to schools. Businesses were shuttered — some permanently — travel halted, grocery stores were emptying of people and supplies, hospitals began to be overwhelmed. The whole world seemed to be holding its breath.

As the summer of 2020 drew to a close, the curve started receding, and that coupled with news of progress on a vaccine seemed to send the national mood in a more optimistic direction.

By this time last year many businesses were reopening with reduced capacity, plexiglass shields, contact tracing, required masking, and bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere. Even with these precautions, cases increased rapidly as October turned into November, and family gatherings for Thanksgiving were discouraged.

Thanksgiving became a high stakes gamble, and the outlook for Christmas was not any better. We all know that there are many greater tragedies that have been visited upon this nation by the pandemic than the break from our traditions. I do not mean to minimize any of them. But as a barometer of our national progress, Thanksgiving is a good place to start.

This year, thanks to the vaccine, the risks associated with traveling to family gatherings, holding parades, playing and attending football games, and (my favorite) Turkey Trot 5ks can all be largely mitigated. Things are not back to normal yet, but over a year and a half into this, we are getting a refresher on what normal used to look like.

And normal never looked so good.

Stores are no longer exclusively patronized by unattended adults mingling with professional shoppers. People are eating at restaurants instead of standing outside them hastily grabbing bags of food. Sales of goods are so strong we are experiencing shortages. Sales of services are also on the rise. People are back in their churches. Kids are back in their schools.

What we had before taken for granted, I now see with stark clarity and renewed appreciation. The ability for our country and our world to recover from the depths of this crisis depends entirely on our willingness to get vaccinated and get the booster. Protecting yourself reduces the likelihood that you will become infected, and if you do become infected the vaccine reduces the severity of the infection. This means you are less likely to get seriously sick, and as important, less likely to spread the virus even if you do get sick. Protecting yourself actually helps protect others too.

The more people get vaccinated, the more quickly we will move towards normal. It is no exaggeration to say that every day we delay achieving herd immunity is one more dangerous day full of opportunities and hosts for COVID to mutate into an even more infectious and deadly virus.

At this point in the war on this disease, we have control over how fast — or how slow — our recovery will be.

Widespread misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine has propagated a resistance to getting it, and this resistance is the main drag on our recovery. Many of those who were the first to start calling for a return to normal are the very ones impairing our ability to do so.

The last twenty months have given us a lot of hard lessons, and I am none too eager to continue this education. This year I am thankful that we have at our disposal the ability to curtail the pandemic so we can bring this tragedy that has become a constant in our lives to an end.

Wood