More than three years after the World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic — and three weeks after WHO said that the virus is no longer a “public health emergency of international concern” — COVID landed at my door.
In the past two years, my partner and I have taken more at-home COVID tests than we can count. After our first test in 2021, we obsessively checked every few seconds to see what the indicator would reveal. Longest 15 minutes ever.
We’re up to date on our vaccinations. We still mask up in stores and on public transportation. We recently attended our first concert in three years and though most of our fellow concertgoers at the outdoor venue weren’t masked, we were. Still we swabbed our nostrils a few days later. Both negative.
So it never crossed our minds as we were about to leave town for the Memorial Day weekend that we would get anything other than the desired result. My COVID test was negative. Hers was positive. A second test confirmed the first.
Within hours she started taking Paxlovid and, after the first day, things have been mostly uneventful. Managing her boredom and how to safely quarantine in our small space have been greater concerns. Oh, and this — I found myself suddenly sympathizing with Bette Davis’s villainous “Baby” Jane Hudson being on constant call for Blanche, her wheelchair-bound sister played by Joan Crawford, in the great camp classic, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
But jokes aside, it’s been quietly harrowing. Even a “mild” case of COVID is still COVID, a virus that has killed more than 7 million people worldwide, at least 1.1 million of them in this nation alone. (And the real numbers are probably higher.) Death has never been the only consequence of this virus. Long-haulers still struggle with debilitating post-virus symptoms that can range from fatigue and chronic cough to brain fog and gastrointestinal issues.
“It’s a cause of great concern,” Dr. Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, told The Washington Post in 2021. “Even if it’s only 10 percent of people who’ve been infected who end up with long COVID ... [t]hat’s a big public health issue.”
As many tossed their masks in junk drawers and got back to “normal,” those with long COVID haven’t moved on because they can’t. Even as the medical and scientific communities have finally gotten serious about studying the syndrome, those suffering are a tangible reminder of what many would prefer to forget — that COVID and its devastation are still very much among us.
Clearly, these aren’t the apocalyptic days of refrigerated trucks used as makeshift morgues, mass graves for unclaimed or indigent COVID victims, and intensive care units so overwhelmed that some COVID patients were sent to other states. But neither is COVID as far in the rearview as many have convinced themselves it is. That includes President Biden, who declared last fall that “The pandemic is over.” In April, he signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to end the national emergency that had been in place since 2020.
Such stances ignore the many people who, due to age or other health issues, remain acutely at risk of contracting COVID. But barring a massive surge from a new deadly variant, no political leader who wants to stay in public office will ever again require masking or social distancing protocols.
COVID still kills hundreds each week. A new booster for those 65 and older was quietly rolled out in April, but only 17 percent of those eligible have gotten it. News broadcasts no longer share the latest COVID data, once a daily staple. It’s as if there was an agreement that COVID would disappear if only we stopped talking and thinking about it. That means this nation has largely resigned itself to the terrible fact that thousands will die from the virus this year and perhaps for years to come.
My partner and I know we’ve been luckier than most. We have jobs which allowed us to work from home through the worst of 2020 and well into 2022, and she continues to do so. She is recovering, but there’s no way of knowing yet what that will ultimately look like. There’s still so much about this virus and its path that remains unclear.
What we do know is that this has been a deeply unnerving experience. We’d been careful, but a thin pink line beneath a blue one on a test strip created a start to our summer that we won’t soon forget. The virus formerly known as a pandemic — one that few want to talk about — is still having its say in our lives whether or not we want to listen.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.