San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
IT’S BEEN 3 YEARS: COVID HAS CHANGED US
Since March 11, 2020, San Diegans have navigated this life-altering era, but hope and resiliency abound
Has it already been three years?
Has it only been three years? The answers vary from person to person, from day to day, and that speaks to the magnitude of what we’ve gone through with COVID-19, which was officially declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
“This is not just a public health crisis,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director-general, in making the announcement. “It is a crisis that will touch every sector.”
Did it ever.
Almost overnight, work was different, school was different, everything was different. Even taking a breath felt different, with a stealthy enemy lurking. Uncertainty abounded, making us fearful. Of the disease. Of each other.
Three years in, and millions of vaccinations later, many of us have moved on, no longer worried every moment about getting sick. We still have those masks somewhere, maybe in a cupboard next to the hand sanitizer.
“We’ve normalized a certain amount of risk that we find acceptable,” said Uma Karmarkar, a University of California San Diego professor who studies how people manage uncertainty.
Yet the virus hasn’t left. Mutations are still happening. People are still becoming infected, joining the nearly 1 million confirmed cases in the county so far. People are still dying, adding to the death toll here that is approaching 6,000.
COVID lingers in other ways, too, large and small. It’s people still working from home and not in gleaming downtown office towers. It’s the plexiglass shields still in place at grocery stores and post offices.
It’s the telehealth appoint
ments doctor’s offices still use. It’s the political theater surrounding hearings in Congress about where the virus originated: Lab leak or wet market? It’s the grumbling about freeways that are no longer Covid-empty.
It’s in our vocabulary, too, a new lexicon of loss and longing. Words such as social distancing, lockdown, panic buying, superspreader, PPE, N-95, in-person. Zoom became a noun instead of a verb.
“Remote used to be what you picked up to change the channel on your TV, and hybrid was what you drove,” said Martha Barnette, cohost of the San Diego-based public radio program “A Way with Words.” Now they both have meanings related to work.
Social scientists here and elsewhere say it will be years before we understand the full impact of the pandemic. The persistent health disparities that put some racial and ethnic minorities at greater risk for illness and death. The fluctuations in psychological distress.
The schoolchildren who never caught up in math or reading. The restaurants and bars that closed forever. The churches left with empty pews.
But they said any reckoning also will have to measure something else that flourished these past three years: resilience.
Fear talking
Remember what it was like, in the beginning?
People waited in long lines outside stores, every 6 feet marked off by tape on the ground so you knew where to stand.
They hoarded toilet paper and paper towels, bought more chicken than their freezers could possibly hold.
That was the fear talking, folks trying to exert some kind of control over a situation that felt uncontrollable.
“People fundamentally dislike uncertainty, especially in the realm of health,” Karmarkar said, “and this was a scary thing we didn’t know much about. There was a sense that it had a time limit, but then it didn’t. A week, a month, by spring, by summer — every deadline came and went and we were left with an astonishing number of decisions that felt like life or death.”
A lot of it was heartbreaking. Patients died in hospital rooms their loved ones were barred from entering; final goodbyes came on cellphones held up to their ears by nurses wearing protective suits.
It was polarizing, too, as face masks and then vaccinations became battlegrounds in the nation’s ongoing political disputes and culture wars.
One memorable flare-up involved a Starbucks barista in Clairemont who asked a customer to cover her face.
She tried to shame him with criticism on Facebook, which caught the eye of a marketing strategist in Orange County. He organized a Gofundme campaign for the 24-year-old barista, Lenin Gutierrez. It raised more than $100,000, making real his hopes to attend college.
“I’ve been given this incredible opportunity that I never saw coming,” Gutierrez said.
People rallied around each other elsewhere, too. There were nightly shoutouts for health care workers in local apartment buildings and condo towers. At the La Jolla Village retirement center, identical 91-year-old twins Jackie Voskamp and Joyce Kriesmer led 10-minute pep rallies from their balcony.
“We come back into the apartment with a big smile on our faces every day,” Kriesmer said in April 2020 after they’d been doing the sign-waving, drum-banging, singalong sessions for about two weeks.
In Carlsbad, John Riedy saw his commercial photography business crater — weddings, real estate portfolios, corporate headshots — so he stayed busy doing “Pandemic Portraits” of families hunkered down in their homes.
“This is real life,” Delia Nichols said after Riedy took a shot of her family on their front lawn. “This is how we dress every day now, in jammies and old clothes. A picture like this will help us remember.”
Riedy charged $50 for the portraits, just enough to cover his expenses. Money wasn’t the motive.
“Perhaps I’ll feel differently after weeks or months of this,” he wrote on his blog, “but for now, I’m optimistic that most of us will make lemonade from these lemons and become closer as families and communities.”
That’s what happened for Victoria Robertson, a professional opera singer. On Easter Sunday in 2020, she went onto her porch in North Park and sang for 20 minutes.
Her neighbors were delighted. She did it again the next week, and the week after that — on and on for six months.
People all over the country heard about the concerts and watched them on Youtube. They sent her fan mail. Some included checks. “It made me feel so loved,” she said. “It was one of the most rewarding things of my life.”
Before the pandemic, she traveled a lot. That stopped, but there were trade-offs. “I got into a relationship because of COVID,” she said. She and her boyfriend, also a singer, hosted weekly music events in the parking lot of his Mission Hills coffee shop.
“All this really heightened my sense of community,” she said, “and it reminded me of the truth about being a musician. In my opinion, we are in service to people. We should uplift them.”
The owner of the North Park home she was renting decided to sell it during the pandemic. Robertson had been there for 17 years. But she didn’t have to look far for a replacement.
One of the neighbors who came to listen to her Sunday performances had a rental unit available in her backyard. Robertson moved in.
One size doesn’t fit all
Talk to scholars at UC San Diego about the pandemic and one of the first things they offer is a cautionary note: This has not been a one-size-fits-all crisis.
How people have been affected, how they’ve reacted, depends on many different things. Their health. Their personality. Their politics. Their age. Their media ecosystem.
“A lot of people had opinions about whether the social isolation we went through was good or bad,” said Karen Dobkins, a psychology professor who specializes in well-being. “It depends on your perspective.”
Introverts thought it was great. “They loved working remotely and discovering that the world didn’t fall apart if they weren’t at their desks for eight hours straight every day,” she said.
For extroverts, though, people who get fulfillment from their interactions with others, “they’ll tell you the pandemic was hard on them.”
She thinks COVID has changed how we think about illness. “It’s raised the bar of what we will take on as risk,” she said. “Whether that’s good or bad, it’s too soon to say.”
Her own teaching offers an example. She runs a course with 350 students that includes three exams. “It was very rare for someone to miss one, because I wouldn’t allow it,” she said. “That means people came in when they were sick, but that’s what we were willing to live with.”
Now, she said, “every time I have a midterm, I have many people say they’re not coming because they’re sick. And I’ve changed my policy: OK, that’s fine.”
She sends them to a center on campus that used to be set aside for students with disabilities who needed a place to take exams. Now it’s regularly filled with students taking makeup exams because they called in sick on test days.
Workplaces are evolving, too. Work-from-home seems here to stay for many people, with more and more companies shifting to a hybrid model that involves some time in the office, said Elizabeth Lyons, a management professor. She’s tracked that through “help wanted” ads.
The shift has forced ongoing changes in the way employees are supervised and evaluated. It’s not how much time they’re in the office, it’s what they’re producing. There’s more flexibility in scheduling to meet individual needs.
“The pandemic forced everyone to reflect, and a lot of employees concluded that the status quo of our work culture wasn’t optimal,” Lyons said. “It wasn’t optimal for firms, either.”
She thinks all that reflecting may lead some companies to move away from the traditional five-day work week. Her own studies are looking at some of the issues raised by the way remote employees are being monitored by their bosses, and at the way teamwork is impacted by at-home arrangements.
“We’re in an interesting experimental period with all of this,” she said, “which is good for researchers.”
‘Extra-entertaining’
Gregory Page was something of a guinea pig himself.
The Uptown San Diego resident made his living as a folk singer and songwriter, which meant a lot of live shows at retirement centers and libraries, as well as festivals here and abroad. COVID killed live shows.
Unlike restaurants, which could pivot to takeout to survive, there was no fallback for a traveling musician. Online streaming has decimated the sales of recorded music.
“I’m someone who always believed in the adage, ‘The show must go on,’ ” said Page, 59. “I’ve gone on stage with a 104-degree temperature. So to suddenly have no control over that, it was hard. I know what they mean when they say you can’t fight City Hall.”
He found ways to stay creative, filming a weekly show called “Almost Live” for Youtube. He wrote songs for a new album, “Modern Man,” that talk about the pandemic and our efforts to navigate it. (One tune is about what nights were like, over and over, for people stuck at home: “Dinner and a Movie.”)
He also learned some things about this place he calls home.
“I honestly could not have made it without the help of my friends, without their generosity,” he said. “In hard times, you see what community is, you see what your safety net is. I definitely feel a deeper sense of connection than I had before.”
His schedule started picking up again last year, even though a tour in Europe last fall got interrupted briefly after he caught COVID. He’s playing retirement centers again, usually with a face shield as a precaution for the listeners.
Audience members have been coming up and telling him he seems “extra-entertaining” these days. He thinks he knows why.
“The gigs are more exciting because I know they could be taken away at any moment,” he said.
He remembers how quiet it was when the pandemic started, fewer cars on the street, less urban noise. He could hear the birds. He took daily walks in the neighborhood.
“We saw life through a different frame, through a different pair of glasses,” he said.
The view was a mixture of good and bad, of dark and light, of life and death.
“What a weird sciencefiction movie we’ve all been in,” he said.