I Still Can’t be Rational about COVID
Welcome to my own, self-conducted therapy session
A few weeks ago, I went to a poetry reading at my favorite bookstore. I enjoyed the poetry. I was even more interested in the discussion between the author and the audience that followed each poem.
The author had written most of the poems during COVID. She and the audience reflected on the dark days of 2020. They talked about this period as a remarkable and unique time in their lives. People talked about their fears, the aspects of “lockdown” that they found difficult and those that they remembered fondly – more time with teenage children, board games, conversations, movies, “zocktails.” Nobody discussed their current relationship with the virus, but these people seemed to have comfortably moved on. There was nary a mask in sight despite us sitting in close quarters in a book shop, in Chicago, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, with the occasional sniffle and cough interrupting the conversation. This crowd seemed to have gotten through the pandemic. Some people had experienced illness and loss; they recognized the threat COVID had posed, were able to consider “COVID-times” as an era that would be an important part of their lives – something about which they might one day reminisce; at present, nobody seemed to be thinking much about COVID.
I contrast this with my relationship to the disease, past and present; a relationship that is not a healthy one.
Maybe, as a doctor, I was particularly scarred by the experience, but I cannot think about COVID in a rational way.[i] My inability to reflect with poise or equanimity surprises and embarrasses me. My recollections are still raw, colored by fear, uncertainly, and powerlessness. I am still angry about decisions that were made to protect people and “flatten the curve” – closing the Chicago Lakefront, keeping my children’s school closed for an entire year – even though I know these were made with the best intentions. I remain embarrassed, rather than amused, by the silly things I did early on. I remember a hike in the mountains of northern New Mexico, summer 2020, on which everyone pulled on a mask when passing each other on the trail. I remember thinking COVID would disappear once most of us were vaccinated.[ii]
I hope I will eventually see “COVID-times” as one more interesting, complicated, period of my life – like summer camp or internship. Presently, I try to avoid thinking about those times, and when forced to, I cringe.
My inability to achieve equanimity with COVID affects me. Rather than assuming the person wearing a mask is getting over a cold or suffers with a serious medical condition, I reflexively think they belong to the group who cling to an irrational fear of the virus. If I reside too far to one side of my well-adjusted, poetry reading acquaintances, I imagine the masked live too far on the other side. Given my work, I interact with this group weekly. Those who remain paralyzed by fear of the virus. I struggle to deal productively with their panic, worry, dread and inability to return to a life in a world that will exist from here on out. As someone who strives to live by the mantra “live and let live,” my difficulty to attain this ethos with the COVID-worried is a failing. I also see it as a failing of medicine, how we failed to educate these people, how we fomented anxiety.
Not wanting to leave this auto-therapy session without a plan, I’ll propose a next step. My wife kept a “COVID Journal” after reading a New York Times article in April 2020. She is an amazing writer and logged the goings on, intermittently, for a little over a year. I’m going to try to read this. I am hoping that this exercise will let me leave the pandemic behind, make it a harmless memory that I can interact with, and allow me a little more patience and empathy with those on the other tail of the normal distribution.
(Photo Credit Engin Akyurt)
[i] I think my attempt at a “Friday Reflection” might have whitewashed my relationship with the disease.
[ii] This might cause me the most angst. What in the world was I, and people who should have known even better than me, thinking saying that a our immunity to a coronavirus would be similar to that of measles.
I will never stop being angry about the way children were treated during covid. I will also never look back on covid times with any sort of fond memories. The majority of humans, especially teens and young adults, are social creatures who need to be around other. Our natural response in times of crisis is to gather for comfort. People died alone, families were separated, and we hit the gas on mental health disorders and addictive behaviors. We also gave up our civil liberties with barely a whimper.
I am a pediatrician, the mother of 2 teenagers, and my first job was in a community health center in a low SES area. It was not hard to predict the impact of school closures on children, especially the most vulnerable students. In the hospital, we were admitting far more eating disorders and overdoses than we were severe covid cases. Every person who advocated for school reopening was maligned and accused of killing teachers. I gave a Grand Rounds in January 2023 about the impact of covid mitigation on children (spoiler alert: It was bad!) and it was considered a controversial topic. Someone accused me of misinformation (I had over 80 sources cited in my talk) and excoriated my department for letting me talk. A year later, the data about harms continues to accumulate. And the powers to be are gaslighting us and, even worse, stating that some mitigation measures were made up. The damage is done and we are left trying to frantically right the ship for this younger generation. And Fauci is still not convinced that school closures were harmful.
I also completely lost faith in the organizations that are supposed to guide us as physicians, specifically the CDC and the AAP. I left the AAP after 20 years for a number of reasons but the nail in the coffin was when they claimed the covid booster prevented severe infection in children 5-11 years old when the Pfizer study did not even include enough children with severe disease to make that statement. Public health also lost my confidence with poor messaging and clearly others feel the same way since routine childhood vaccine uptake is declining. Can't wait for polio to make a comeback.
Like you, I am skeptical of young people who continue to mask. At this point, it is either anxiety or virtue signaling. I refuse to play the game and I point out the lack of evidence and downsides to the residents and students. I emphasize the negative impact on communicating with people with hearing impairments or in those for whom English is not their first language.
Most frustrating is that this got so politicized in this country. Many people are stuck behind their party lines and it is unlikely that we will be able to have a clear-eyed review of what went right and wrong.
I work in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital and I keep asking myself, am I the only one still angry about the stupid decisions of the medical community? I think when I went to the beach with my dog and it was prohibited really put me over the top. Or was it when I was hiking in the finger lakes and masks were mandated and signage said so, people looked at me and shook their heads "I wasn't wearing a fucking mask outside on a trail". I'm still waiting for someone to tell me it will never happen again. I am not optimistic. Just sad and mad. Thanks for your writing your thoughts. It made me feel better about mine.