Milestone offers reasons for hope
What have we learned in crisis? Patience, resilience are key
On a dreary, otherwise unremarkable gray Tuesday in March, the Bay Area hunkered into isolation, the first place in the nation shut down by the nascent coronavirus pandemic.
At the time, many people assumed the order would last a few weeks, maybe into the summer. Sheltering in place was unprecedented and extreme, but necessary — a shortterm solution to a potentially disastrous threat.
That was six months ago, marked Thursday. The virus remains widespread. The economy and labor market are sluggish. Most Bay Area offices are empty, as are schools. Just about everyone is still huddled in their homes.
What is clear now is that for all the lives that have been upended — slowly, stubbornly — people are learning how to coexist with COVID19. What was so unnatural has become second nature.
That doesn’t make it easy, nor bring comfort to people bracing for the future. The next six months will bring new challenges, including delayed financial burdens coming due and flu and holiday seasons that could derail coronavirus containment.
Yet, many people see reason for hope, particularly in the prospect that we actually will face headon the societal weaknesses exposed by the pandemic. And that past our collective loss may lie resiliency.
“We have the opportunity to strengthen
our broken places,” said Dr. Michael Rabow, an expert at UCSF in palliative care, the discipline that seeks to boost quality of life despite serious illness. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”
But these past 185 days have not occurred in a pandemic vacuum. Fires rage all around the West Coast. Smoke has choked the air for weeks. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis ignited a racial justice movement, which in turn triggered a backlash in a country divided further by a culturewarrior president.
The crises have been mounting into a tower of collective grief and anxiety as we mourn the loss of more than 1,300 lives in the Bay Area and fear a deeply uncertain future. Last Wednesday’s apocalyptic skies — under a sun shrouded in smoke — felt like a breaking point.
“Everything around me, inside and outside, feels wrong,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley, during a phone interview on the day the sky remained a burnt orange from dawn to dusk.
He acknowledged that the relentless tragedy was weighing heavily on him that day, and the sunless sky may have tainted his perspective of the pandemic, past and future. Looking back at March 17 when the Bay Area’s shelterinplace orders were issued “almost feels quaint,” he said.
There were only a few hundred total cases of COVID19 then. The region reports that many in a single day now.
“I don’t think there’s an end game to this, not in the short term, anyway,” Swartzberg said. “This pandemic is going to die not suddenly, but slowly, with a whimper.”
At some point it’s struck all of us: This pandemic, and all of the related or simply concurrent tragedies happening alongside it, is not ending any time soon.
Survival is adjustment. This sixmonth mark of the pandemic may in hindsight be the time of reflection, as the Bay Area and beyond figures out what matters most and how they can best live in a time of oppressive uncertainty. Even, or perhaps especially, when the sun refuses to shine.
“We have endless reminders that reality is different now, and we’re struggling with that,” Rabow said. “We’ve come up against a disease that proves not everything is in our control, in fact most things aren’t. And the question is: How are you going to respond to how the universe works?”
The next six months
For all that people have been talking about putting 2020 behind them for the better part of the year in question, it’s likely that 2021 won’t look a lot different, at least in pandemic terms, public health experts say.
One or more vaccines almost certainly will be available, but they’re probably not going to quash the coronavirus on their own. In a likely bestcase scenario, a vaccine could be effective enough, and taken by enough people, to protect about half the population. Over time, that would reduce the spread of disease so that public health measures like contact tracing and quarantine would eventually end the crisis.
But that would take many months, even a year or longer. And in the meantime, life in the Bay Area won’t necessarily look much different than it does right now: masks and social distancing, pandemic pods and Zoom visits with the grandparents.
“One of the big challenges that awaits us over the next six months is how we respond to the fact that our salvation isn’t coming in the form of a vaccine,” Rabow said. “That really focuses us on coexistence — this idea we need to figure out how to live our lives in the longer term in ways that are satisfactory. And that involves a balancing of risk.”
Many public health experts began talking about a “harm reduction” approach to the coronavirus back at the start of summer, when they realized that people were beginning to socialize again and return to other parts of their lives deemed necessary.
In the coming months, especially with schools starting up and the year’s biggest holidays still ahead, decisions about how to live with the virus are going to become more challenging. The upcoming flu season and fears over how that will stress the pandemic add complications.
Parents will need to face the consequences of not just a few months of virtual learning but potentially an entire year. Families will wonder whether to risk spending Christmas with older relatives who are more vulnerable to the coronavirus but may not have many more holidays in their future.
“It’s tricky. But to be absolutist and say it’s morally wrong to be involved in anything that’s risky — you can’t do that for a year and a half,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine. “This thing is no longer a novelty, it’s no longer a ‘Let’s buck up and get through a few months.’ As you decide how to personally weigh risks and benefits, you have to factor in the notion of sustainability.”
Wachter knows this as well as anyone. Last week he flew to Florida to visit his parents, ages 90 and 84. He thought about the risks he was taking as he boarded the plane.
“You have to weigh the possibility that something bad will happen,” he said. “I minimize it to the degree I can, but then I said, ‘You’re a human, you have to make a choice here. You can’t not see your friends and family
for two years.’ ”
Weakness and resilience
One of the most upsetting aspects of the pandemic has been the suddenness of the shock. Millions of Bay Area lives were upturned dramatically, almost overnight.
This virus, in a matter of months, exposed decades of deeply rooted societal weaknesses, particularly racial disparities. Latino and Black communities have endured a far higher burden of illness and death than others. Concurrent crises have further tested the Bay Area’s collective resilience: weeks of human rights protests in the spring and summer; recent fires and smoke pollution and a climate change reckoning. That all sits amid a backdrop of a growing anxiety about a particularly divisive presidential election.
“When disaster becomes the new normal, that’s when you start getting emotional burnout,” said Paul Saffo, a Bay Area futurist and forecaster. “The difference between a burst event like the two towers dropping on 9/11, and then a sustained event like now — that’s where I have noticed the real emotional fatigue.
“We talk about resilient individuals, but resilience is something that can be applied to societies,” he said. “And obviously the ability to bounce back is the question now. How resilient is California?”
Lifechanging events, even in the most harrowing times, have a way of narrowing focus, of compelling people to identify the values that are worth protecting, said Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and founder of its Greater Good Science Center.
The racial disparities spotlighted by the pandemic have existed for decades, but now they’re intractable — to get out of the pandemic, the communities of color hit hardest by disease need to be the focus of resources.
Just as last week’s orange skies and the seemingly endless days of fires and smoky haze are coalescing into a call to arms over climate change, maybe the Bay Area finally will seek solutions to structural racism and access to health care as well, Keltner said.
“We are at this pivotal moment: What’s the narrative of this pandemic? Is it about health disparities? The structure of our society and what we need to improve?” he said. “Or do we lose that narrative?”
People tend to go about much of their lives on a sort of autopilot, said Jamie Kimmel, a staff chaplain at UCSF Medical Center. The pandemic has been incredibly destructive. Nearly 200,000 people have died in the United States, millions have lost jobs and may lose their homes, or are unable to feed themselves or their families. But destruction inevitably breeds change, and sometimes that can be healthy, he said.
It’s not unlike a wildfire raging through an overgrown forest and making room for new life in the years ahead.
“The pattern of our lives has been interrupted, and when things like that shatter, that gives us a moment to put the pieces back together in different ways,” Kimmel said. “I don’t know if I’m hopeful or not that things will change for the better — I suspend judgment there. But it’s certainly possible. And I think that it’s possible collectively, but also individually.”
Unified feeling of loss
The Bay Area has weathered this pandemic better than most other metropolitan areas in the country. Even after the surge that swelled over the region all summer, the hospitals were never overwhelmed and the death count has remained startlingly low.
But people here have experienced grief, and for many it’s settled on their shoulders only recently — with the start of the school year and the realization kids may not go back for the rest of the year, with the understanding that it may be impossible to share Thanksgiving with extended friends and family.
The Bay Area already has lost San Francisco Pride and a summer of music festivals. There will be no Halloween, or Christmas Nutcracker ballets with the children. Everyone’s worlds are so much smaller, reduced to the people they live with and the occasional questionable social gathering. Some people who live alone have had no physical contact at all for months.
“People are in a state of grief, whether it’s a loss of someone you know, or loss of life as we have known it before,” said Belinda Hernandez Arriaga, a social worker and founder of
ALAS (Ayudando Latinos A Soñar), which supports farmworker and lowincome Peninsula families. “You’re grieving the loss of being able to be with loved ones, to have events, to have celebrations. It’s this unified feeling of loss. We might not even know what we’re grieving, but it’s important to acknowledge it.”
The 2020 news cycle has been dizzying, the Bay Area enduring one trauma upon another. But this pandemic also has been eerily quiet, said Saffo, the futurist and forecaster. The past six months have been reflective for many people, and the next six months may bring more of the same. Or they may be the time of action — of finally emerging from isolation for real, of truly striking that balance between living and mere survival.
“Mental resiliency comes,” Saffo said. “No matter how strange things get, you can find a point of reference and use that as a landmark to find your way through it. The sky is going to clear, and it’s going to be blue again and everyone will go back to what they were doing.”
Saffo said he’d been on a phone call last week with other futurists, talking about forecasts for the next six months. He was assigned the “rainbows and unicorn” projection — a bestcase scenario. In an interview from his home in Burlingame, he seemed nonplussed by the pandemic, or by the smokedarkened skies. Futurists, after all, are in the business of uncertainty.
Then he paused midsentence. “Oh, my God, this is interesting. An owl just flew by my window,” he said. It was 1 p.m. and twilightdark. “That’s not normal.”
No, it’s not.