A Glance At COVID-19 Two Years Later

Greeting Stewards! 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have gotten sick and many lives were lost. But along the way, confusion and uncertainty have persisted around why some people get sick and not others, and why some people get infected and not others. Some people still have not yet contracted the virus. Some people contracted it in the beginning.  Some have contracted it twice or more, and some people are finally contracting it for the first time now. 

 A New York Times opinion article reflects on contracting the virus recently and how their views on COVID-19 changed through the past two years of the pandemic.  Megan Stack begins the article saying, “It took me so long to catch Covid-19 that by the time the virus finally struck, I’d started to assume I’d already had it or, better yet, maybe some people just weren’t susceptible, including me. That’s it, I decided: I must be immune.”  

Stack notes that she was lucky to catch COVID-19 after already being vaccinated and boosted. She reflects on whether she had been too careful or too reckless over the past two years, writing, “In our collective zeal to sterilize our surroundings, we shrank from one another, left families to fend for themselves and dismantled the economy.” While isolating to avoid the virus, Stack spent many weeks collecting oral histories/stories of our American pandemic. 

“A hairdresser in the Midwest, who had split from her old friend and business partner in indignation over the other woman’s refusal to wear a mask, had balked at the vaccine — and didn’t want to be identified, lest her customers get spooked. A single mother in the South had blocked her teenage son from going out but allowed him to work at a daycare. Every interview contained immense sorrow (my interview subjects had suffered in ways that hadn’t even occurred to me), punctuated by abrupt breakdowns in logic. People had made irrational choices; they couldn’t tidily explain themselves.”

From her interviews, Stack learned that “none of us knew what we were doing.” The stories that she collected were filled with contradictions and mixed emotions. In the absence of certainty and a constantly changing array of possibilities, people did the only thing they could do to stay sane, which was to create some basic narratives of our own to contextualize the risk and rationalize our choices. In addition to her story collecting, Stack also interrogates her personal experience of contracting COVID-19, and how her beliefs shifted. 

We hope you find Stack’s essay relatable and illuminating.

As always, PAHS is still recruiting for our Uncertain Together 2022 Forum Series! More information and dates of our forums can be found on our Forum Page. To register for our forums, please use the button down below. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at steward@umn.edu.

Warmly, 

Asheanna