A post last night to a local politics page in many ways encapsulates 2020:
Thinking about flying somewhere for a getaway? Please don’t. My brother-in-law’s perfectly healthy 34-year-old nephew died yesterday. He and his wife and three children had flown from Georgia to Colorado for Christmas so the kids could see snow. He started to feel bad on the flight back and began vomiting. Once they got back to their house he began vomiting blood. He went outside to get some fresh air; his wife came outside looking for him when he did not return and found him collapsed, dead. He had positive post-mortem covid test. You think it’s not connected? All I know is he was a healthy, fit young man with no pre-existing conditions, period, and now he’s dead.
A couple of commenters sympathized with the neighbor, having lost family of their own to the disease: a brother even younger, a mother-in-law.
We can infer that man had the wherewithal to jet his young family to Colorado for Christmas; that the family had not lost its income to Covid; that it was secure in the belief its income would continue uninterrupted in the new year. We need not infer that vacation travel by air was highly risky behavior. That’s plain. More holiday travelers will meet a similar fate soon enough.
For a few survivors, even a mild case of the illness will have lasting neurological effects. For one, post-Covid psychosis.
A 42-year-old physical therapist with no history of mental illness reported months later “she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them.” She had had only mild coronavirus symptoms in the spring, the New York Times reports:
A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window.
A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed.
[…]
Brain scans, spinal fluid analyses and other tests didn’t find any brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital has treated two patients with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices and believed he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who began carrying a knife, disrobing in front of strangers and putting hand sanitizer in her food.
The psychosis appears treatable, but for some only after weeks of hospitalization and after trying multiple medications. The rest of us were lucky enough to just lose time and income.
This lost year is not unique in the level of global disruption, Joe Pinsker writes at The Atlantic. The 1918–19 influenza pandemic was intense but brief, disrupting life in affected cities by only two or three months. Historians cite the Civil War, two world wars, depressions in the 1870s and 1890s, and the Great Depression as significant disruptions. Pinsker adds 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia leading to “the Year Without a Summer” and the crop failures and food shortages of 1816:
But while the features of 2020 have all arisen in the past, they never arose all at once. “The particular combination of delayed timelines, diminishment of celebrations, and evacuation of public life characteristic of this pandemic is relatively unique,” [Brown University’s Robert] Self said. There really is something distinctive about the lost year we’ve been living through.
Pinsker checks in with numerous people whose lives were put on hold by COVID-19, some students delaying grad school, others trying to decide what to be when finally they grow up. Long-term planning is out this year for many. A 31-year-old audiovisual technician “stuck” in San Francisco explains, “Why bother long-term planning when this is how the world works?” For others, the future ceased to exist in 2020, as did they.
Waiting for normal life to restart will take its own toll “in a culture that ties people’s worth to their accomplishments and work ethic.” People’s sense of time’s passage has been altered too by the isolation, by missed celebrations, human interactions. and a year of lost memories.
Pinsker concludes:
This is one way many people will remember 2020: It was interminable to live through, but swift in retrospect. And as more time passes and the memories people do have degrade, maybe it will start to seem even shorter, and emptier.
Hopefully, the future will be more vivid. “I think the fact that we’re not making memories right now means that when you finally get back out again,” Santos said, “time is going to go by really fast because we’re doing fun things, but it’s also going to be etched in our memory books in a really richer way.” After a gray year, we might see the times to come in Technicolor.
But the pandemic’s direct and indirect effects will not be the only enduring ones from 2020. Armed anti-maskers stormed state capitols and threatened revolution; unknown thousands bought into a conspiracy theory about a secret cabal of cannibal pedophiles; police killings provoked Black Lives Matter protests from coast to coast; and a major political party enabled an unhinged president in his attempt to overturn results of a national election. The virus has undermined all our lives (and terminated hundreds of thousands). Trumpism has undermined the republic. It ain’t over until 2021, if then.
The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, you will help make 2021 brighter.