The Coronavirus Diaries: The Anniversary Edition
A male caryatid on the exterior of a theater in Tours, France. September 4, 2020.
Shortly after the coronavirus crisis began, in spring 2020, I realized that I needed to start documenting my thoughts and experiences. Everything seemed to happen and change so quickly that it felt impossible to keep the particulars straight in my mind—even moments after something occurred.
For two months, I posted a weekly diary entry on Observing Leslie. My undergraduate institution, The Johns Hopkins University, asked me to write an essay about the project for their alumni magazine. The documentation process seemed important for reasons I couldn’t clearly define then and can’t even still, a year later.
After eight weeks, I decided to transition to occasional updates on the situation. The pace of events had begun to slow; weekly diary entries on the crisis felt less necessary and somewhat repetitive. However, I knew even then that I would write a coronavirus diaries anniversary post.
I’d thought a year after the start of the COVID-19 saga would look much different than it does, though. I’d envisioned an anniversary post that read more like a postmortem, rather than an update of an ongoing event. As it stands, the state of things may require a second anniversary post a year from now.
The crisis continues.
Ahead of this post, I asked myself three questions to evaluate the state of the world and our thinking one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to think through the following questions for this essay:
What have we kept since the beginning of the crisis?
At a fundamental level, what has changed in our lives due to the pandemic?
What do we believe has changed permanently due to the coronavirus crisis?
Read on for my responses and the insights others have shared.
What We’ve Kept from the Beginning
First: We’ve kept the virus.
Though it seems obvious in the moment, I don’t think many of us had the forethought to predict this level of ongoing crisis-management a full year after it began.
Some people figured the virus would have run its course across the globe by now—that it wouldn’t have completely disappeared, but that it would have certainly decreased in virulence. Something along the lines of the 1918 influenza pandemic: We still have the flu, but that strain of it rampaged hard for nine months and then ran itself to ground.
I’d count myself in this group: Even in the first coronavirus diary, when I recorded our predictions, I’d put this pandemic more in the influenza 1918 category (severe, brutal, coming and going in a rapid sweep) than in the bubonic plague category (seemingly eternal waves of greater and lesser intensity).
One year after the crisis locked down the western world (Asia had the rough awakening before we did), the virus still rages. Before we could come to grips with its original formation, it mutated into different strains—some of which are even more contagious and more lethal than the first one.
Various parts of the world still have some level of confinement or shut-down restrictions in place, including my canton of Vaud in Switzerland. Some countries in Europe, including Portugal and Italy, have even restrengthened restrictions after easing them in the summer and fall of 2020.
Keeping the virus means that we’ve kept much of what came with the virus. Beyond the varying levels of confinement and social distancing, we’ve mostly kept masks, on-line gatherings for social and professional purposes, home-based work and school, and obsessive handwashing and disinfecting.
What in Life Has Changed
What in society has truly shifted due to the pandemic?
Beyond the move of work, school, and social gatherings from in-person to videoconference and continuing mask requirements, what fundamental societal changes has the virus crisis wrought?
Unquestionably, the COVID-19 crisis sped up drama and catalyzed major changes in many lives. I know several people who had psychological fall-out due to the stresses provoked or exacerbated by the crisis. I know people who lost work or took significant hits to their businesses. I have friends, professional contacts, and family members who stared into the abyss of a raging and relentless international crisis that threatened their lives and their livelihoods and realized that they needed to make significant changes in their personal and professional lives—from simple additions of long-coveted hobbies to overhauls of careers and endings of marriages. In different times, these epiphanies and their outcomes may have come far more gradually or may never have happened at all.
Concurrently, COVID-19 slowed down life’s pace. I’ve noted and have had many other people tell me that the frenetic nature of their lives relented due to the pandemic—and that they don’t want to go back to schedules crammed with back-to-back activities and little time to breathe. Further, when vastly fewer options for activities exist, we’ve all grown to savor each one even more.
A friend (who has a wonderful blog that you can find here) shared that she and her husband accelerated their timeline to sell their home to begin working remotely while traveling and enjoying life a bit more—a perfect example of the mix between some events speeding up and others slowing down, all due to the crisis catalyst.
“Five months in, we have no regrets and are loving this new life. I think people are realizing how short life is,” Sandy said in an e-mail to me. “Maybe more of us will focus on living, not just advancing.”
Predictions for Permanent Changes
What has permanently changed in our world due to the pandemic?
I struggled with answering this question, as “permanent” for anyone who has studied history with any seriousness for any period of time (I’ll go ahead and count my undergraduate and graduate studies as qualifying me for this category) knows that very little lasts forever.
However, if I try to predict what consequences of this pandemic will last for the course of my lifetime—which counts as “permanent” from my personal perspective, at least—I’d say that people’s comfort with personal and professional videoconferencing will stay. People may go back to plain old phone calls once they have other opportunities to see people in person, but people will forever feel more comfortable with business meetings, educational and professional development sessions, social gatherings with scattered friends, and the like via videoconference.
Hand in hand with a comfort for distanced collaboration and connection, I feel the world has grown more comfortable with distributed work and that this comfort may even morph into enthusiasm as companies begin to realize the significant advantages of distributed workforces and asynchronous work methods. (You can find my series of articles on these topics via this link to the full collection.)
Sandy, my friend who has sold everything to work from wherever and see the world, added that she believes we’ll see a permanent change in business travel due to the pandemic.
“I don't think we'll ever return to prepandemic levels,” she wrote me. “One of my responsibilities is best practices, and I think there's a nugget in there, related to traveling only when needed, either for relationship building or because the client or partner wants you there in person.”
Where Does it End?
At moments, this crisis feels eternal. I can hardly remember the beforetimes. I don’t know when the aftertimes will come or how they’ll take shape.
At other moments, it feels like the light at the end of the tunnel grows increasingly brighter as a greater proportion of the world’s population gets vaccinated.
We face still far too much uncertainty. How much longer will this last? When will the world truly exit the coronavirus crisis?
I don’t know. I don’t even feel confident enough to venture a hypothesis this time around.
If you have insights to share on any of these questions, I’d love to have your additions to the dialogue. Please share your thoughts and observations to the comments.