The vaccine has arrived. The first doses have been given in the United States. Although the logistical problems of delivering the vaccine to at least seventy five percent of the American population will be gargantuan—assuming most people will even accept it—it is not unreasonable to believe that our lives will return to normal by the summer.
And let me be clear by what I mean by “normal”: we won’t have to wear masks anymore; we’ll be able to shake hands with someone we just met; we’ll hug friends and family; we’ll actually see friends and family. The size of our own little worlds will once again expand to all points on earth that can be reached by a flight, instead of the short distance marked by the limits of quarantine.
In the meantime, we are in the midst of the second wave of the pandemic, its ravages accelerating even as we approach Christmas and prepare for the darkness of winter. In the spring I had assumed that by December I would be consolidating and practicing the lessons learned from the trauma of the spring while seeing friends and family in person and shaking hands with strangers. It was a wonderful fantasy. Today I am preparing myself for a hard winter. A very hard winter. The trauma has yet to end.
New York has shut down its restaurants again. Other states in the Union that had resisted any kind of limits during the first wave have now imposed restrictions. We just passed 300,000 dead from covid-19 and next 100,000 lost will come faster than the last. The vaccine has arrived but there will not be enough doses to inoculate even the 25 million or so in the high priority categories: healthcare workers and the elderly.
We know now that there is a light at the end of the tunnel but it is still too far away for us to see. So what do we do until then?
The pandemic has taken away a lot from us. And some of us have lost far more than others—far more than any one of us should have lost. But for those of us that have survived, there is one thing that the pandemic has given us that would not have otherwise had: time. We were given time in the same way that prisoners are given time. We didn’t ask for it, but now we have it. What do we do with it?
This pandemic will end. They always do. This one will end much sooner than previous ones have because of the miracles of science. But if all that happens when this global trauma ends is that we return to the exact same world we left behind, we will lose even more. The world we left behind was more selfish and cruel than it should have been. That world did not value all human lives equally.
If my life returns simply to what it once was once I am vaccinated and can transact daily life without fear of infection or infecting anyone, I truly will have lost all that time. I will have been given an extra year of time without anything to show for it.
We all paid so much for the education that was this pandemic, we should come out of with lessons of great value. What should those lessons be?