Thursday, November 11, 2021

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part Two



June 2020

Before the pandemic, my three-year-old son and I had time to ourselves during our weekly grocery store trips. That was our thing, our dedicated time together. And I missed it terribly.

 

Before the pandemic descended upon us, our son was already far more attached to my wife. But his attachment to her became more extreme during the pandemic. If she wanted to run an errand, she would have to sneak out of her parents’ house without him noticing because he would otherwise cry and wail if he knew she was gone.

 

During his early years, I saw my son cry on many, many occasions. Early in the pandemic, when my wife would try to leave the house to go to the store, he would wail with what felt like fearful despair. He would stop as soon as she stepped back into the house. It was a different type of crying. If we had tried to explain the pandemic to him then, he couldn’t have comprehended what was happening, but he knew something was terribly wrong. I have no doubt.

Two and a half months into the pandemic, my wife and I were not getting much time to ourselves. Since we worked together, back to back in the same small bedroom converted into a home office at her parents’ house, we were around each other 24/7 except on Fridays when I had the day off and stayed home. I was fortunate to have that day to myself. We were fortunate that I had that day to myself. Though it wasn’t much time, I would have suffocated without it. But I felt awful we couldn’t give her time to herself because it wasn’t safe to take our son to the grocery store and he didn’t want to go on hikes alone with me.

 

In early to mid-June, multiple protests were held in the Bay Area to denounce police brutality. For the first time in nearly a decade, I felt compelled to participate in such a demonstration, especially in my beloved Oakland, but I saw photos of the protests and I was afraid they might be superspreader events, so I sat them out.

 

Instead, feeling like an angry, caged tiger, I followed the uprising from home, doomscrolling on Twitter.

 

On June 8th, the New York Times polled 511 epidemiologists on when they expected to fly, hug, and do eighteen other everyday activities again. I studied the poll results and essentially took the results as guidance on the riskiness of such behaviors.

 

President Trump planned to hold an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 

The sign-up page for guests to register for Trump’s rally in Tulsa contained a disclaimer stating attendees “voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19” and agree to not hold Trump’s campaign, the venue, or any affiliates liable for any illness or injury:

 


Like others, the novel coronavirus confounded me. Why did some people become symptomatic while others experienced asymptomatic infections? Back then, I wondered if it had anything to do with one’s blood type.

 

In late June, I drove up to Oakland to have a socially-distanced brown bag lunch with a friend in his backyard. Since the pandemic began, it was the first time I saw any of my friends in person. At first, the visit made me feel a bit nervous, but once I left, without giving my friend a hug, I felt a bit lighter.

 

Our “COVID bubble” significantly expanded when my brother-in-law began to drop off his adopted four-month-old daughter at my in-laws’ house thrice per week to care for her while he and his wife worked.


The addition to our COVID bubble, and all the added risk, made my wife and I uneasy. I jotted down a diagram of our bubble then to help us assess all the risk we were taking working remotely every weekday from her parents’ house while they cared for our son.




My wife and I considered hiring a nanny to limit our exposure to other households through my in-laws’ house, but there would be risk with that alternative as well. In the end, every member of our bubble simply vowed to do what we could to be safe.

 

July 2020

On July 6, 2020, hundreds of renowned scientists called on the World Health Organization to better reflect COVID-19’s potential for airborne transmission.

 

In early July, I read a Business Insider article detailing a CDC study focused on an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19 in China who is believed to have contributed to the infection of 71 people in the surrounding community. Although patient zero quarantined in her apartment after having travelled from the United States, it is believed she infected others in her apartment building by using their communal elevator. The CDC believed fomite transmission occurred from the elevator buttons and this scared the fucking shit out of me.

 

On July 9th, it was reported that nearly 50 million Americans had filed for first-time unemployment benefits over the past 16 weeks.

 

A Washington Post article asked Dr. Anthony Fauci and four other health specialists dealt with COVID-19-related risks in their everyday lives. They asked them if they took any precautions with their mail or packages. Fauci said he simply brought the mail in, washed his hands, and would not open it for a day or two. That seemed like sound advice so I did the same, allowing our mail to pile behind our couch for at least a day before I handled it.

 

A video of a four-year-old-girl from Phoenix, AZ, crying and venting about the COVID-19 lockdown, went viral because so many of us—children or adults—could relate.

 


On July 15th, it was reported that the Trump Administration was ordering all hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington. According to the New York Times, “The Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions.”

 

On July 16th, the United States reported a then-single-day record of 75,600 COVID-19 cases, breaking a record it had set just a week before.

 

In late July, the world received a ray of hope: pharmaceutical company Moderna announced it would start a Phase 3 clinical trial on July 27th for its COVID-19 vaccine, which would include 30,000 participants across 87 locations. Pfizer also began its Phase 3 clinical trial on July 27th.

 

August 2020

One Saturday morning, my wife, son, and I woke up early, had a quick bite to eat, and got dressed to sneak out to a nearby playground. My wife had asked me if I thought it would be safe if we allowed our son to play on the playground and I told her I thought it was fairly safe, even though public health officials recommended their continued closure.

 

We drove into the park, which we had all to ourselves. The main playground was wrapped with yellow caution tape that was easy to step over. My son climbed up to the top of the playground. “Giant…slide!” he said as he knelt down to go down a steep slide that we loved to ride with him. I stood at the bottom of the slide and filmed him and my wife with my phone camera. Once he slid down, he peered at me and said “Giant slide,” then smiled and zipped off as he uttered a few laughs brimming with glee as he ran back up the playground to go down the slide again.

 

We stayed at the playground for at least half an hour. My wife vigilantly sanitized our son’s hands and we kept a watchful eye on him, fearful he might stick his mouth onto the play structure. My wife periodically glanced around, afraid we would get busted for breaking a public health order. “I don’t want to make a habit of this,” she remembers I told her when we left. “Just once a month.”

 

In early August, months before the election, President Trump participated in an interview with Axios's Australian reporter Jonathan Swan about America’s pandemic response. Trump described the pandemic as “under control.” “How?” Swan responded. “A thousand Americans are dying a day.” “They are dying,” Trump replied. “That’s true. And you…it is what it is.”

 

From August 7 to 16, about 460,000 persons from across the United States descended upon Sturgis, North Dakota for a motorcycle rally. Not surprisingly, many attendees—who are politically conservative—chose to not wear masks at outdoor concerts or inside crowded bars and restaurants. Within weeks of the gathering, rural states like the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana led the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita. Ultimately, more than 330 COVID-19 cases and one death were directly linked to the rally, and this is, in all likelihood, a gross underestimate since it is difficult to conduct accurate contact tracing for such a widely-attended event.

 

On August 16-17, intense thunderstorms slammed into central and Northern California and resulted in more than 15,000 lightning strikes, sparking fire after fire according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection website. On August 19th, Governor Gavin Newsom reported that the state was battling 367 known fires. The state’s first giga-fire—the August Complex—alone consumed one million acres in the northern Coast Range.

 

Shortly after, the air quality index in the Bay Area reached high, unhealthy levels. Not only were we shuttered in from the pandemic, but the air outside was so bad that we couldn’t spend much time in our backyard (A.K.A. our pandemic haven). In short time, the three of us were cooped up inside, and it was a rough few weeks.

 

Sometime in August, I spoke with my mother over the phone and she told me that she had flown to Salt Lake City in late May to celebrate my cousin’s marriage. She told me she kept this from me because she knew I would not be okay with her risk-taking behavior. I just laughed when she told me. What could I possibly do?

 

On August 28, 2020, a twenty-five-year-old man from Nevada became the first known case of COVID-19 reinfection in the United States. Previously, there had been four other reinfection cases worldwide in Hong Kong, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ecuador.

 

With these COVID-19 reinfections, it became virtually certain that herd immunity would be impossible to attain against this coronavirus.

 

September 2020

Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said the company could have results from its Phase 3 clinical trial as early as October 2020.

 

On September 9th, the San Francisco Bay Area had a blood-orange apocalyptic sky due to the smoke from surrounding wildfires. It was absolutely jaw-dropping to witness. Something I will never forget.

 

That morning, my son was confused by the dark, sickly-yellow, seemingly overcast sky. “It’s nighttime,” he kept saying, pointing or staring at our home office window with befuddlement.

 

Soon afterward—although my wife didn’t connect the dots until a few weeks later—our son became inexplicably scared of the dark.

 

On September 9th, Bob Woodward—who is supposedly a journalist—disclosed in his upcoming book that President Trump told him in February 2020 that he knew how deadly COVID-19 was, but he went on to purposely play it down. Here’s a soundbite from that telephone interview:

 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It goes through air, Bob. That's always tougher than the touch. You know, the touch…you don't have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air. That's how it's passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than your…you know, your…even your strenuous flus.

 

On September 12th, the U.S. reported 1,224 deaths. Canada: 0:

 



At this juncture in the pandemic, I theoretically knew our newspapers and news websites would someday not be filled with stories and headlines about the coronavirus pandemic, but I couldn’t imagine when that would be, or how our world could ever mirror the one we used to inhabit.


On Friday, September 18th, the CDC posted updated guidance saying that aerosol transmission might be one of the "most common" ways the coronavirus is spreading, but then they took down that guidance that following Monday stating that it “posted in error to its website.”

 



On September 28, 2020, the global total of deaths related to COVID-19—which is probably a gross underestimate—surpassed one million.

 

On September 29th, President Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden had their first debate inside a pavilion in Cleveland, Ohio.

 

October 2020

On October 1st, it was announced that Hope Hicks, a senior aide and close adviser to President Trump, had tested positive for COVID-19. It was reported that she had recently traveled with the president aboard Air Force One.

 

Once that news broke, my good friend and I, along with many, many, many other Americans became feverishly excited at the prospect that Donald Trump may be infected with the coronavirus.

 

The next day, to my great delight, Donald Trump tweeted that he and his wife, Melania, had tested positive for COVID-19. It quickly became his most retweeted and liked tweet ever. Later that day, he was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

 

In total honesty, that twenty-four-hour span between Hicks and Trump testing positive was one of my high points during this entire pandemic.

 

I joked with my wife that Trump’s treatment plan would undoubtedly include lots of McDonald’s hamburgers.

 

Out of curiosity, I looked up the nearest McDonald’s to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center via Google Maps. The closest one is 4.7 miles away on 7101 Democracy Blvd in Bethesda, MD.

 

Although I greatly disliked Joe Biden, I, along with many, many others who simply wanted to unseat Trump from the presidency, became fearful that Biden may have been infected with the virus during the first presidential debate.

 

Shortly after Trump’s positive results for COVID-19, Biden continued to get tested every day. Many of us felt relieved when his results continually came back negative.

 

On October 5th, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tested positive for COVID-19.

 

On October 5th, to the disappointment of countless people around the world, Donald Trump emerged from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and returned to the White House via helicopter. But he visibly gasped for breath upon the White House balcony, which gave me and several of my friends hope that he may still die from COVID-19.

 

But alas, he didn’t.

 

In mid-October, Dr. Fauci spoke with the medical community at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and was asked about COVID-19 vaccines, herd immunity, and how much longer the American public would have to wear masks. “You’re not going to have a profound degree of herd immunity for a considerable period of time, maybe toward the end of 2021, into 2022,” he said. “I feel very strongly that we’re going to need to have some degree of public-health measures to continue. Maybe not as stringent as they are right now. It’s not going to be the way it was with polio and measles, where you get a vaccine, case closed, it’s done. It’s going to be public-health measures that linger for months and months.”

 

On October 16, 2020, I tweeted: “These days, trying to be a rational, sensible human being has never been so exhausting.”

 

Soon afterward, my family and I took a short break from the pandemic grind at a cute organic farm up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Our son loved the hayloft converted into a spacious one-bedroom Airbnb space. He dubbed it “the beautiful house.” Although it was just a weekend trip, it felt rejuvenating to go on an adventure near home.

 

A week later, on October 22nd, the United States smashed its previous daily record of new COVID-19 cases with 77,640. A day later, the U.S. again broke its own record with 79,303 new COVID-19 cases. In spite of this, President Trump continued to repeatedly and publicly state—as Election Day neared—that the U.S. was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic.

 

On October 26th, after recovering from the coronavirus, President Trump held a nighttime ceremony on the White House lawn to swear in Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a virtual do-over of the superspreader event held in the Rose Garden on September 26th that is believed to be when Trump and several others in his inner circle contracted the virus.

 

By the end of October, playgrounds were reopened in Alameda County. And so, my wife and our son met up with my younger sister and my nephew, who is a year younger than my son. From the parking lot, we spotted four kids playing at the vast playground. My son allowed my wife to put on his cloth mask but he refused to get out of the car. "I'm not safe," he said, staring at the kids on the playground.

 

November 2020

On November 1, 2020, Australia reported zero new COVID-19 cases for the first time in five months.

 

A few days later, on November 4th, more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases were recorded in the U.S., marking the latest single-day record high.

 

The following day, the U.S. again broke the single-day record of new COVID-19 cases with 120,048. Up until that date, Japan—a country that presumed the novel coronavirus was primarily airborne since February 2020—had 103,838 COVID-19 cases over the entire pandemic.

 

The B.1.1.7 variant of SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in the United Kingdom in early November from a sample taken in September.

 

On November 7th, Joseph Biden officially won the 2020 presidential race.

 

President Trump refused to concede the race. In an official statement on the election result, he said: “The simple fact is this election is far from over. Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”

 

Eric Topol, MD, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a professor of molecular medicine tweeted:

 

 

On November 12th, the Forest Service reported that the August Complex was completely contained. Ultimately, in 2020, 4.2 million acres burned in California, which is equivalent to the entire area of Los Angeles, Orange, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties combined.

 

In mid-November, I drove to San Francisco, a city I once called home for seven years, to meet up with my dear friend who was visiting from New York City. It was my first trip into San Francisco in nearly nine months.

 

My friend and I took a long walk from Bernal Heights all the way to Dolores Park and back. Along the way, practically everyone we saw wore facial coverings. Throughout their parks, they had “I got you covered” or “Protect yourself. Protect others.” signs posted to encourage folks to mask up. It was refreshing to see, and it was a far cry from what I typically saw in the East Bay suburb I call home.

 

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that on November 6th Governor Gavin Newsom attended a birthday party at the posh French Laundry to celebrate a longtime friend and political adviser. At the time, California state guidelines limited gatherings and defined them as “social situations that bring together people from different households at the same time in a single space or place” to no more than three households.

 

On November 9th, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that its “vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection” in their first interim efficacy analysis. It was the most encouraging thing I had read during the pandemic.

 

A few days later, Moderna announced that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate had “a vaccine efficacy of 94.5%” in its first interim analysis.

 

Sometime in early or mid-November, my mother texted to inform me that she was in Guadalajara, Mexico, visiting my aunt and one of her other sisters who had flown from Perú to reunite with them. She told me she didn’t want to tell me about her trip because she knew it would upset me.

 

The CDC advised against Thanksgiving travel. Public health figures implored the American public to not convene for our typical large family gatherings to celebrate Thanksgiving. With COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon, ones that yielded vaccine efficacy rates far higher than expected, it was reasonable to believe public health experts when they reasoned that this year’s holiday season may be the only one that will be abnormal due to the pandemic.

 

And yet, the Transportation Security Administration said that it screened 9.4 million people during the Thanksgiving 2020 window, with the Sunday after Thanksgiving as its busiest day of air travel since mid-March 2020.

 

My sentiments about Thanksgiving in the pandemic year of 2020 were perfectly captured with this tweet from Nawat descendant and writer, Freddy Jesse Izaguirre:

 


Both of our families cancelled their customary Thanksgiving gatherings.

 

And yet, my mother, who had just returned from Guadalajara a few days before, sat down for a Thanksgiving meal with my eighty-one-year-old father, my sister (who has a Master’s Degree), her college-educated boyfriend, and their infant son, which means my mother may have quarantined for a day or two at most before she—as the matron of their household—openly and brazenly dismissed public health guidance during a historic pandemic.

 

The posed pictures my sister and mother subsequently shared of their tiny Thanksgiving gathering, all of them smiling for the camera, just induced a mixture of pain, rage, hopelessness, and exhaustion within me.

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