The Coronavirus Diaries: The Third Anniversary Edition
All masked up and traveling home to Switzerland from Washington, DC. February 26, 2023.
I’ve put off drafting notes for this third anniversary edition of the advent of COVID-19 in the western world because I couldn’t believe that I really needed to continue to mull over the pandemic. Perhaps I didn’t really need a third anniversary edition, after all?
Then I reviewed my second anniversary edition and couldn’t believe how different the situation seemed from that year to this one.
Well, and I came down with COVID-19 myself after three years of avoiding it, which didn’t help my energy or motivation to write just about anything. And further convinced me that, yes, the pandemic continues.
To honor the spirit of the project, I knew I had to force myself to the keyboard to provide an update. As a refresher, my goal from the beginning of the coronavirus diaries project—as I recounted in more detail in The Johns Hopkins University The Hub magazine—is to document as best as possible what happened, when, and with what impressions for the someday-historians who study this period and its pandemic. (To flip through the entries in full, see my coronavirus diaries repository.)
An Overview of Year Three
At the close of year two, government-imposed restrictions related to COVID-19 had mostly dropped, followed in near lockstep by restrictions in private industry. As predicted, widespread formal restrictions did not return over the third year—not that the virus disappeared.
Some events over the past year have required negative COVID-19 tests to attend—all the way up to today—though these requests don’t require formal proof of a negative test, as far as I’ve seen. They trust what their attendees tell them.
However, lack of restrictions doesn’t mean that prepandemic levels of social and interpersonal activity returned. I thought activity levels had returned to “normal” long before they did—and perhaps they still haven’t moved into full swing. (My perceptions on this count feel particularly uncertain because I hadn’t moved to Switzerland very long before the pandemic arrived, so I don’t have a solid “before” picture.)
As I suppose makes sense, businesses and organizers didn’t want to have to cancel or reschedule yet again if more restrictions or a new virus or aggressive COVID-19 variant appeared, so everyone took on the restart process with extreme caution. Only over the past few months have I seen a serious reflourishing of events and activities.
In the previous anniversary updates for my coronavirus diaries, I posed myself three questions:
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?
To keep to the same format, I’ve crafted responses to the same questions at the end of year three.
What We’ve Kept
Frankly, we’ve kept very little of the daily life adjustments required by the advent of the COVID-19 crisis at the third anniversary mark:
I’ll occasionally see other people with masks—but rarely and almost exclusively in public transportation (if then). Airports and recent transatlantic flights had very few mask wearers. However, that I do see masks in the wild means wearing a mask in a public place might seem less bizarre to others than it likely would have seemed before the pandemic. That said, I have still gotten questioning or even sarcastic comments over the past year from friends and acquaintances (not strangers) when I wear mine.
The virus hasn’t left us. However, few people get tests or autotest when sick and most individuals, clinics, and even hospitals no longer report positive COVID-19 results when they do test. Therefore, data on a local, regional, national, and even global level is nonexistent or weak, covering only serious, hospitalized cases (if that).
What Has Changed
In general, in terms of overall private and public behavior, has anything changed as of the third anniversary of the arrival of COVID-19?
Honestly, very little. Few of the social adjustments that the pandemic provoked have held firm—even the basic public-health measures that everyone should have learned during the pandemic given the ad nauseam public health outreach. This includes coughing and sneezing into the elbow (or at least a hand that the person afterward washes or disinfects), washing the hands with soap (at all, much less for twenty seconds), and greeting other people with gestures other than cheek-kissing, hugging, and hand shaking—such as a wave or a fist- or elbow-bump—that minimize transmission of many infectious diseases.
I observe only a few social changes that have stayed in place since the pandemic started:
Working from home has become more acceptable, despite the continued push from employers and city governments to bring people back into the office. (Reasons for the predominantly top-down push: Office-space investments, lack of effective remote-team management techniques and training, tax revenue, investment returns, desire to avoid city replanning, and beyond.) Despite pressure on the worker to come back to the central office, working from wherever better suits the employee—and to attract the best employees, employers must accommodate them. Plus, the pandemic has made it very difficult for employers to effectively argue that all work must happen in a central location.
Videoconferencing remains and now appears to be the default for most business and personal conversations that do not or cannot take place in person. However, while in 2022 some gatherings still took place on-line that could have taken place in person, people seem to have snapped back to desiring in-person interaction when they can get it. I believe we’ll see an overall evening out, with more meetings and conversations moving back on-line in the future. The current trend away from on-line interaction when circumstances do not require it stems, in my opinion, from people needing a break from their computer screens after having had such a sudden, intense, and unrelenting relationship with them for the past three years.
Permanent-Change Predictions
What of the COVID-19 related behavior changes or overall social changes do I feel we’ll keep permanently, long after even the rippling waves from this crisis have passed?
I think we’re seeing it. Anything that’s stuck around until now will continue to stick around.
In other words, not much.
Does this surprise me? Absolutely.
Perhaps not as much as many of the pundits who opined that the world would forever change on multiple levels due to the COVID-19 pandemic—I’ve studied enough history to know better—but I did believe (as you can verify from my earlier diary entries) that more would still linger today from the pandemic times than has.
Will I Write a Fourth Anniversary Post?
I cannot imagine having much to say for a fourth anniversary post, given how little has changed or evolved between years two and three—and given that I highly doubt we’ll have a new wave of restrictions or a new chapter in the COVID-19 pandemic story.
Though I won’t jinx us by declaring it so.
What have you observed during the third year after the arrival of COVID-19? How would you answer the three anniversary questions I’ve posed myself each year?