COVID free was a misplaced fantasy!

Vaccinated Americans experienced a very brief period of "COVID freedom", during the spring and early summer of 2021, when infection rates dropped and we felt secure from the risk of illness.

But, not so fast! This echo opinion by Luke Winkie, published in The New York Times, is like reading a mirror on my mind. His experience certainly shares my COVID reality.  (By the way, Winkie's prose need some modest dictionary translation so the "i.e.'s" are my edits.)

I Was Euphoric in June. Look Where We Are Now.

My girlfriend and I wasted no time this spring. As soon as the Moderna vaccination fever left our bodies in May, we gleefully quadruple-booked every empty weekend left on the calendar. The itinerary swelled beyond precedent. Weddings, birthdays, family reunions and no-occasion rooftop hangs gridlocked into one another, evoking a logistical crisis every evening. I chilled in the cheap seats at Citi Field, sucked in the stale air at the Alamo Drafthouse and drove to both northern and southern Vermont in the span of three weeks. The world was in bloom, and both of us were desperate to witness it firsthand.

In retrospect, maybe we should’ve been more aware of the precarity. Only fools underestimate COVID after our extended stay in hell, especially as the threat of the variants morphed from an irritating paranoia to a very disappointing reality. There will never be another season quite as joyful as the summer of 2021 — my girlfriend and I partied exactly as hard as we promised we would — and yet, here at the beginning of September, I’m feeling frustratingly naïve. Those first few post-vaccination months turned out to be not the conclusion of the pandemic but a brief, debaucherous (ie, excessively indulgent) respite before yet another deadly wave of the virus. Is it possible to be hoodwinked by a respiratory disease? This is a question I never thought I’d need to ask.

God, I miss that ignorance. Remember the short period of euphoria when the whole nation believed that the pandemic had been defeated for good? Remember how we danced on its grave? You saw the mania everywhere. All of the fantasy vacations — hatched in the dim pits of 2020 — became manifest, and the leisure sector huffed and puffed to catch up. Airlines struggled to find enough pilots to meet the renewed demand, and rental car companies quickly ran out of vehicles. There were reports of a tuxedo rental shortage in Boston, leaving countless groomsmen low on sartorial (ie, fashion) options now that it was no longer possible to exist exclusively in boxer briefs.

I had never felt so exhausted in my life. Sundays in the early summer of 2021, were reserved for feeble recovery and the ominous threat of next week’s overflowing schedule. Could I get a pandemic-delayed surgery on Thursday and make it to the Rockaways on Saturday? Is it possible to attend three parties in four hours? These were the pertinent questions of the era.

But then came the Delta variant, alongside a petri dish of other foreboding Greek letters, and once again the nation is on borrowed time. The dizzy glee that defined those early days of sunshine, as all of my friends feasted on triumph, transformed into an arcane (i.e. mysterious) moral calculus.

I ignored all of the Delta headlines at first, simply because it seemed sacrilegious to harsh the indelible vibes of June and July. When it became clear that the numbers were not going to come down — when questions about vaccine efficacy breached into the national conversation — a familiar dark ambiguity washed over our apartment. Inscrutable questions of transmission, mutation and breakthrough infections hovered around every social appointment.

Our long-gestating Italy trip, originally scheduled for last spring, has returned to its yearlong holding pattern. We’ll be packing our vaccination cards in November when we travel to a Miami wedding that’s enforcing strict inoculation requirements. I think I speak for everyone when I say that I am so tired of not knowing if I’m doing the right thing.

By August, I was attempting to indulge in as much corporeality (i.e., body experience) as possible, before any shutdowns rolled back into place. I’m still going out, I’m still seeing my friends, and I continue to agonize over the moral responsibilities concerning a virus that seems to change in nature with each passing day. Perhaps that is the lasting imprint the pandemic will leave on our brain chemistry: this unshakable feeling that the simple pleasure of drinking inside a bar is too good to be true.

In April 2020, I wrote about watching old sports broadcasts on my laptop while civilization stood still. It was easy to envy the fans in the bleachers who were completely unburdened by all the dread we’d accumulated during the pandemic. I relished the idea of joining them after COVID finally retired to the history books — to banish the misery with gusto and pride. 

I think we’re all becoming accustomed to the truth, that escaping from a pandemic was never going to be so simple. The restoration is going to happen in fits and starts, with a permeating sense of unease. When will I stop waiting for the other shoe to drop? Ideally, someday in the far-off future, when our lives have fully returned to normal, without anyone realizing it.

Until then, I’ll always be grateful for the summer of 2021, and its wondrous preview of what lies ahead.