Pandemic Perspectives from Our Readers

Last week we requested your retrospective thoughts about the pandemic. Here are a few of your submissions!

Washing Off Potato Chip Bags

On March 9, 2020, we attended a Purim celebration at Shaarey Zedek with our children and grandkids. We had heard stories about the spread of a deadly virus, but there we were with doctors and their families feeling unaffected and safe, that is, until the next day when everything shut down. It was quiet with no airplanes overhead, no traffic on the roads and no construction noises. So quiet that we could hear nature around us and nature was not in fear of us coming out for a romp or a flight.

Looking back, we were participating in a civic experiment of unknown duration. Faced with a public health crisis with no known cure and deadly outcomes, we chose informed self-preservation. We only saw our kids and grandkids online or at a distance for the first two months, until we closed a tight family circle. Low contact parking lot drops from the store to our car trunk were an innovative way to secure food items that we antiseptically wiped down in the garage before bringing things into our home bubble.

Once it was clear that this was an airborne contagion, my wife sewed masks to help protect us from viral sharing.  I am still unsure of how many people knowingly ignored the potential dangers or how much people were resentful of the government-supported public health professionals or even those of us making an effort to mitigate the spread. We watched TV reports of evening call outs to first responders from the windows above New York City. We tipped appreciatively to keep family restaurants in business. We saw chancy gatherings and knew people who contracted the virus.

January 4, 2021, was our first public venture to Macomb Community College where masses of people were being inoculated. It was reminiscent of in-person class registration in the 1970s and very disorientating after not having not been in an indoor public space in nine months.

In times past, the rapid achievement of effective vaccines and treatment would have been a proud moment for Americans. We would have welcomed the government responding with support for first responders, stabilizing a catastrophic situation, and providing financial support to vulnerable businesses to help return things to normalcy. It was messy, it was risky, it was imperfect and regimented too, but it appeared to me as well-intended.

Was it wrong? Was it overreach? Was it unnecessary? Were we betrayed?

Today, our government’s ability to protect and respond is becoming undermined and dismantled and people are being pulled off the streets with no due process. Is it all the same assault on freedom?

I think back on the overworked first-responders, Scenes of overcrowded hospitals, the inability to keep up with burying the dead. I remember the uncertainty at the beginning when I was wiping down boxes and canned goods and washing off potato chip bags to mitigate an invisible and unknown assailant. As much as I can tell, we have remained Covid-free to this day. I am also glad to think that the establishment had our backs on this one.

Paul Levine / Oak Park, Mich.

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How I Learned to Love the Pandemic

I got all the boosters, as many and as often as my alerts told me to. Then I took it upon myself to update even those who didn’t want to hear about the pandemic not being over. And worse even, chant my mantras about the next pandemic with my favorite quip of “Be a microbe, See the world.” Such an onus to be in public health and try to communicate with the public about public health!

Also, in the name of public health (mixed in with advocacy, anger, and anxiety), I found myself spending my time reading leaked budgets, budget drafts, budgets passed, funding rescinded, and funding gone with fury and anger. Now I'm mostly concentrating on the Feds - the HIV funding and departments going extinct like the dinosaurs and progress made with HIV will be progress lost.  Irate at cuts for USAID, PEPFAR and programs that kept disease and starvation at bay but instead have had their supplies locked in warehouses as people die. 

So 51 years in public health—hardly a field when I began and only six schools offering an MPH and about 40 years of me working with HIV–I never thought protests from long ago would become a way of life, letters and calls to Congress, posts on social media and I'm sure making some ex-friends in this process. But the reality is that our Secretary of Health and Human Services, the MAHA guy, is gonna kill us!

Helene Bednarsh / Sharon, Mass.