Virus fatigue grips America
Though pandemic affects all, some face worse stress than others
Gabe Rice began sheltering in his suburban Phoenix home with his wife and three youngest children in March. They worked remotely, learned remotely and put social events on hold to hunker down alongside much of the country.
It was challenging and frustrating but, Rice initially assumed, temporary. It seemed like a plausible plan to help the nation get the pandemic under control within a couple of months.
But Arizona’s economic reopening in May, urged by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, was soon followed by a spike in coronavirus infections in June, which became a terrible surge in hospitalizations and deaths by July.
Then came August, and the devastating realization for many Americans that the pandemic, which has killed at least 159,000 people across the country and sickened more than five million, is far from over.
“It’s difficult when you think you have a light at the other end of the tunnel to look forward to, and then all of a sudden you realize it’s a train,” said Rice, 44, a program coordinator at Arizona State University.
An exhausted, exasperated nation is suffering from the effects of a pandemic that has upended society on a scale and duration without parallel in living memory.
The Rice family and millions of other Americans are wrestling with difficult questions about how to juggle school, pay their bills and look after their mental and physical health.
Parents lie awake, their minds racing with thoughts of how to balance work with their newfound role as home-schoolers. Front-line health workers are bone tired, their nerves frayed by endless shifts and constant encounters with the virus and its victims. Senior citizens have grown weary of isolation. Unemployed workers fret over jobs lost, benefits that are running out, rent payments that are overdue. Minority communities continue to shoulder the disproportionate burden of the contagion’s impact, which in recent weeks has killed an average of about 1,000 people a day.
The metaphor of a marathon doesn’t capture the wearisome, confounding, terrifying and yet somehow dull and drab nature of this ordeal for many Americans, who have watched leaders fumble the pandemic response from the start. Marathons have a defined conclusion, but 2020 feels like an endless slog — uphill, in mud.
Recent opinion polls hint at the deepening despair. A Gallup survey in mid-July showed 73 percent of adults viewed the pandemic as growing worse — the highest level of pessimism recorded since Gallup began tracking that assessment in early April. Another Gallup Poll, published Aug. 4, found only 13 percent of adults are satisfied with the way things are going overall in the country, the lowest in nine years.
A July Kaiser Family Foundation poll echoed that, finding that a majority of adults think the worst is yet to come. Fifty-three percent said the crisis has harmed their mental health.
In a podcast released Thursday, former first lady Michelle Obama directly addressed the mental toll, saying she has struggled with the quarantines, the government’s response to the pandemic and the persistent reminders of systemic racism that have led to nationwide protests.
“I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression,” she said.
Historians say that not even the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States, had the same kind of all-encompassing economic, social and cultural impact.
“One of the biggest differences between this virus and [the 1918] influenza is the duration,” said John Barry, author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.
With coronavirus, he said, the incubation period is longer, patients with symptoms tend to be sick longer and many take longer to recover. Barry said leaders did not make sufficiently clear early on the simple epidemiological truth that this would be a painfully drawn-out event.
“Part of the frustration and disappointment and depression, frankly, is because of the expectation that we’d be through this by now,” he said.
President Donald Trump repeatedly promised a quick resolution. He conjured the image of church pews packed by Easter. The White House recommended 15 days of restrictions. That was then extended by 30 days, to the end of April. On Thursday, Trump said a vaccine could be ready by Election Day, Nov. 3 — a date well in advance of what his administration’s own experts think is likely.
But the virus has repeatedly shown that it has its own timetable. The first wave of shutdowns helped reverse the frightening trend lines of March and early April but came nowhere close to crushing the opportunistic pathogen. And now the season of the pandemic is indisputably the year of the pandemic.
“This will be a long, long haul unless virtually everybody — or a very, very high percentage of the population, including the young people — take very seriously the kind of prevention principles that we’ve been talking about,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview.
“It is within our power and within our will to really get it down to a level that’s low enough that we can do many of the things that would get our economy going again,” he added. “There will be a long slog if everybody doesn’t pitch in.”
Not everyone is experiencing the same level of stress, and everyone’s pandemic struggles differ. Any essential worker exposed to highrisk conditions day after day has more urgent concerns than someone merely stuck at home and missing out on summer barbecues.