I think of March 9th as the start of the pandemic because 9 March 2020 was the day I stopped seeing people, the day I began taking precautions. Gary or the news might tell me we started on another day, in my head it was the 9th. I had shopped in Portland, played Scrabble with a friend, entered stores unmasked. And I stopped doing those things. I stopped hugging. We did not see our family for almost a year.

I know people who considered the pandemic restrictions mere inconvenience. They continued to hold family parties, go on cruises, fly for work and vacations. My husband and I didn’t do most of those things. We invited our sons and their families to visit once we were all vaccinated and boosted and tested. At other times we wore our masks indoors except at home unless we could keep yards away from anyone. We have eaten at an indoor restaurant four times in two years, and while I can’t say I regret taking that risk, and am very, very grateful to be healthy. I won’t be doing it again.

I am retired. I have more choices than most.

This winter I began putting monthly warps on my loom. Above is February. March is below. At twenty skeins each, I hope weaving monthly warps will work through my stash. (But you know I still order yarn, so… )

It is useful work and also avoidance, because I do not want to think too much about avoiding disease or missing people.

We know people who have been sick and who have died. We have family who are anti-vaxxers who have been sick for weeks. Our most immediate family have been tested many times. We have not. Our youngest son who is a theater electrician says when he’s upside down hanging a light 40 feet over the stage and his mask begins steaming up his glasses he will be glad to briefly take off his mask, but he will continue to mask in most situations. He doesn’t trust others to be as careful as he has been.

We have remained healthy ourselves, not even a cold in two years. We have continued to get our flu shots, are vaccinated with Moderna and boosted. I read the news.

Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver. Many people were denied the familiar rituals of mourning—bedside goodbyes, in-person funerals. Others are grieving raw and recent losses, their grief trampled amid the stampede toward normal. “I’ve known multiple people who didn’t get to bury their parents or be with their families, and now are expected to go back to the grind of work,” says Steven Thrasher, a journalist and the author of The Viral Underclass, which looks at the interplay between inequalities and infectious diseases. “We’re not giving people the space individually or societally to mourn this huge thing that’s happened.”

After many of the biggest disasters in American memory, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, “it felt like the world stopped,” Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters, told me. “On some level, we owned our failures, and there were real changes.” Crossing 1 million deaths could offer a similar opportunity to take stock, but “900,000 deaths felt like a big threshold to me, and we didn’t pause,” Peek said. Why is that? Why were so many publications and politicians focused on reopenings in January and February—the fourth- and fifth-deadliest months of the pandemic? Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?

Ed Yong in The Atlantic

This week the mask mandate ends in Oregon and we will continue to mask.