‘I worry that people have forgotten': 6 writers on covid's anniversary

Washington Post

07-03-2025

The pandemic approaches five years. We have returned to normal, but are we the same?
The fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring covid-19 a pandemic is March 11. We asked six Opinions staffers to reflect on the pandemic and how their lives changed.
Shadi Hamid
Missing the solitude of covid
Like with many things in life, I realized I had it only when it was too late.
During the pandemic, few of us were truly locked down. In D.C., restaurants reopened for outdoor service in May 2020, about two months after we were told to stay at home. But those two months of forced isolation are something we'll likely never experience again — and I mean that in a (partly) good way. I look back at that brief era with longing, a reminder of the kind of person I wished I could become but never did.
We didn't have choices, or to put it differently, the choices were taken from us. In his book 'The Paradox of Choice,' the psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the idea that too many choices produce paralysis and then often discontent. Here, instead of choice, we had constraint. And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom.
It was a natural experiment. How do we live when we have few, if any, social engagements? How do we live when we're given an excuse to keep to ourselves, when there's no risk of missing out because no one's out in the first place? Apparently, quite differently.
I looked at my phone a lot less because I didn't have plans to make, confirm or cancel. I read constantly, as if possessed. And it was like bliss, like I had been granted powers of attention and concentration I never knew I had. I could turn the pages for hours without interruption. It was one of the last times I fully got into a book, in this case Norman Mailer's 1,056-page masterwork 'The Executioner's Song,' so immersed that I forgot that there was a pandemic in the first place.
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I mostly ignored dating apps, which are as awful as they are necessary because everyone else is on them. But now, for a moment, there was no real shame in being alone. For the first time, I didn't feel guilty about feeling lonely.
Instead of dating or going to parties or trying to figure out which restaurant had enough seating for six friends on a Friday night, I prayed more and meditated. I thought more deeply about my life, and how I wanted to live. But I also did things I always said I wanted to do but — short of a natural disaster — knew I never would. Like watch the films of the Swedish existentialist director Ingmar Bergman, which are notoriously challenging and require considerable patience. As it turns out, they're also incredible. Yes, it was a bit masochistic, but watching 12 of his films in rapid succession ended up being an unusual highlight of an unusual year. I also live-tweeted the experience, perhaps as a way to make a solitary adventure less so.
(Corbis/Getty Images)
Five years later, that time in my life seems singular. It's also a bit blurry. Did it really happen? I remember thinking — incorrectly — that our lives would be forever altered by this rare collective experience of trauma. In having so much taken away from us and the people we loved, life was 'distilled' to its essence, as the writer Tara Isabella Burton noted in an evocative essay on lockdown nostalgia. We could more easily distinguish between what truly mattered and what didn't. But it didn't last. We returned to normal. Much of the country memory-holed the pandemic. Today, except the odd mask here or there, there are few if any noticeable vestiges of the worst plague in a century. All we have is our memories. And some of them are good.
Eugene Robinson
A room with a view
On the day when the country shut down because of covid-19, those of us in the news business — who get paid to know what's going on — were just as clueless as everybody else.
Newsrooms had always been busy places, day and night. The clatter of typewriters had long since given way to the hush of the modern keyboard, but the teeming bustle of in-person collaboration remained. Suddenly, overnight, that had to end. Smart people somehow instantly invented a way to publish The Post with almost everyone working remotely. This had little affect on me; I already filed my column from home quite often, so that was something I knew how to do. The far bigger impact, as far as my working life was concerned, came in my role as a talking head on MSNBC.
That week, I was scheduled to go to New York to do commentary for the network at its 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters. I called and confirmed my assumption that the trip had been canceled. Then I heard nothing for the next few days — MSNBC was absorbed in its own process of reinvention — before finally receiving an urgent instruction: 'Set yourself up for Zoom or Skype or something as soon as possible.'
Uh, okay. I had only the vaguest idea how to do this, and I knew that nobody had the time to teach me. So this would be interesting.
I signed up for a Skype account. I chose a corner of my study that I thought would make a suitable 'bookcase' backdrop, which was something I saw other commentators were doing, and experimented until I found the ideal placement for my laptop. When I was asked to do my first television hit from home, I was all set. I recorded it, but only to see if I needed to do any fine-tuning.
It looked and sounded like a hostage tape. A particularly grim one.
There was no mystery about what I needed to change: everything. The image and sound were awful, so I ordered a webcam and a set of the newest AirPods, to be delivered the following day. The lighting was ghastly, so I called a friend who happens to be a professional photographer and asked him to find some suitable lights, but not the little ring kind that reflects weirdly off your glasses. I found a much better background that included not just the bookcase but also a corner of one of the great paintings by my wife, Avis. And to position the laptop and the webcam just right, I ordered a cheap, little, Chinese-made, two-tiered table off the internet.
At year's end, Avis and I were honored for creating 2020's 'best room/art' by the viral Room Rater Twitter account. My jury-rigged home television studio served me well — and serves me still.
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Aaditi Lele
The 18-month spring break
It began with an ominous email from my history teacher on the eve of spring break during my junior year in high school.
The remainder of Ohio's in-person 2020 Mock Trial competition had been indefinitely postponed, our travels to Columbus canceled because of covid-19. I was initially disappointed. (For the first time in three years, my team had qualified for the final round.) But the prospect of an extended spring break, at least, could bring any student a glimmer of consolation.
Or so I thought. The universe contorted my hopes. An extra week, maybe two, could have been a fun reprieve. Eighteen months gets to be a tad excessive.
Soon enough, it became apparent that lockdowns were not easing and adjustments would be necessary. Virtual school meant entire days spent at my desk. So the first order of business was rearranging my bedroom. The desk moved to the front of my window — an attempt to maintain connection with the outside world.
Then came new habits. For months, I attended each online class with crochet projects in my lap — fiddling with yarn kept my hands busy, helping me concentrate on the screen for hours on end. (I later graduated with not just my diploma but multiple new blankets.) I traded gossip by the lockers for FaceTime chats between classes, lunchroom conversation for silent meals at my dining-room table. The coda to my high school education arrived via a little red 'leave call' button on my screen.
It became difficult to distinguish the 'school day' from the remainder. If I wanted structure, I had to build it. I adopted bullet journaling, color-coded time blocks for each aspect of life. Everything was scheduled: Weekend park picnics with friends. Daily walks with my sister. Family movie night. Zoom calls. College applications. The self-imposed rigidity was essential for my sanity, but I quickly learned that no amount of scheduled social time can replace the serendipitous: running into someone in a hallway, sharing laughs on the bus ride home, feeling the buzz of our school newspaper office. There is something inherently irreclaimable about being 17.
I never attended an in-person high school class again.
So I lived through the latter half of high school without experiencing it, grew older without growing up. Lacking milestones to anchor that period — no prom, no senior trip, no college tours — it all blurs together. Those two years fast-forwarded life — the days so similar that, in memory, they compress into one. Five years later, my abridged bridge into adulthood leaves little to be nostalgic for.
The writer is an assistant editor for Opinions.
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Chloe Coleman
Bonding through a love of horses
My husband and I had an unconventional first year of marriage.
Our wedding, planned for May 2020, had to be quickly reimagined due to the covid-19 pandemic. My dream nuptials transformed into a self-officiated ceremony in a local park with two socially distanced friends. Ultimately, though, our bonds strengthened that first year of covid.
We were intensely cautious with our health back then, in the first months when there were so many unknowns about the virus and my husband's job required venturing into the fray. He is a photojournalist and faced infection risks each day in the field. I was an international news photo editor, glued to world events as I worked long hours from our one-bedroom apartment to manage photographers on assignment.
We largely kept to ourselves in 2020 other than precious social-distanced outdoor visits with friends. In spring 2021, we looked for activities we could do together that posed minimal health risks. After a year of being limited to the borders of D.C., we wanted to find a hobby out in the countryside.
My husband, knowing my lifelong passion for horses, suggested we book some trail rides. I eagerly researched nearby options. Soon, he was ready to go beyond the cruise-control nature of trail-ride horses. He began wondering how we could 'go faster.'
I was adamant that attaining speed with safety requires skill. That led us to a barn in Northern Virginia, where we took riding lessons as a pair, despite our differences in experience level and preferred riding style (he the cowboy and I the dressage equestrian). Our weekly lessons became a ritual we depended on — not only the fresh-air physical exercise, which requires awareness of your entire body, but the extended community we found with our instructors and the emotional healing power of horses.
Chloe Coleman's 2022 vow renewal ceremony in Ohio. (Photo by William Snyder)
My husband calls horses 'trauma vacuums.' The horses we rode over our first months of lessons had their own traumas — many had been rescued, were seniors with chronic pain or were retired racehorses trying to find second chances. But they always honored us with patience. Whatever we experienced during the week could be washed away not only by riding, but by the simple acts of getting our horses from the pastures, grooming them and laughing at their antics.
By the time we renewed our vows in 2022, with a ceremony closer to the original wedding we had planned, my husband had the skills to ride a horse down the aisle at my family's farm. Last year, I returned to horse ownership for the first time since I was a teenager. Though we might have missed a lot that first year of our marriage, the experiences we eventually gained gave me the most unexpected gift — a husband who has become as wild for horses as I am.
The writer is a photo editor for Opinions.
Megan McArdle
We need a covid reckoning
In the pandemic's early days, a wise friend pointed out that there is little literature of the 1918 flu pandemic. The 1918 pandemic killed more people than World War I, and as in war, those people were disproportionately young. Yet in postwar literature, the war is the starring player, while the pandemic has, at most, a bit part. The same is true of books, television and movies of the covid-19 era: Depictions are curiously sparse, relative to the magnitude of what we endured.
He suggested that this was because the pandemic offered no opportunities for valor, only suffering. And, I'd add, for regret over mistakes that were made. The mistakes that we made.
I can't be the only one who recalls furiously washing groceries before putting them away during those first panicked days. Or who followed strict hygiene and quarantine procedures when caring for my covid-positive father, long after — we now know — he had probably stopped being contagious. Then there were the much more consequential mistakes society made, such as padlocking playgrounds, shutting down beaches and keeping schools closed.
Many of those mistakes were understandable in the face of a novel threat. Basically anything that happened between March and June 2020 should be written off to the challenge of making decisions with insufficient information. But other mistakes, such as the testing debacle at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reflected long-standing institutional problems. The worst mistakes involved insiders allowing their expert guidance to be influenced by their political priorities, from the CDC letting teacher's unions affect its recommendations on school closures, to public health officials abruptly pivoting from telling us to avoid crowds to endorsing the protests over the death of George Floyd.
A children's playground is closed at Anthem Park on April 3, 2020, in Anthem, Arizona. ()
We haven't reckoned enough with any of it. Yes, there have been inspector general reports and retrospective articles, but we have not had a deep, society-wide conversation about what we got wrong and how to fix it before the next pandemic. Instead, we have divided into two warring camps, one that will probably refuse to do anything in the face of another pandemic, and the other that seems likely to repeat the same mistakes.
Very well, I'll start. Alongside my personal mistakes, I made professional ones. I overestimated the effectiveness of lockdowns and underestimated their likely duration. I endorsed vaccine mandates, which turned out to sacrifice a lot of liberty for little benefit, because the vaccine wasn't effective enough to generate herd immunity against a mutating virus that sometimes produces no detectable symptoms. I also wrote about much of it more intemperately than I should have — venting, rather than persuading.
I hope there won't be another major pandemic in my lifetime. If there is, I hope to avoid similar mistakes (though very likely, I will discover some new ones). Most importantly, I hope that if we have an honest reckoning, we can come to some measure of mutual understanding and perhaps even forgiveness for the lamentable but inevitable errors that fallible humans tend to make in times of unprecedented distress.
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Leana S. Wen
A new life, a dark time
The first days of the pandemic were the final days of my pregnancy.
My daughter Isabelle was born in April 2020. How I remember covid-19 will forever be intertwined with her infancy and toddlerhood.
The day I went into labor, the hospital felt like a ghost town. Patients had canceled appointments for fear that they would contract the coronavirus. This wasn't an overreaction. When I checked in, I learned that several nurses and an OB/GYN had just become infected with covid-19. There wasn't enough staff in the postpartum ward, so I was discharged straight from the delivery room, hours after giving birth.
Post columnist Leana Wen with her daughter Isabelle in April 2020. (Family photo)
It wasn't safe for anyone to visit us. Our family, who lived out of the country, couldn't travel; it would be two years before Isabelle met her grandparents. To protect our newborn, we took every precaution. Our other child, then 2 years old, stopped preschool. When I went back to seeing patients as a doctor, I was so paranoid about infecting my family that I took off all my clothes in the garden and washed myself with a hose before going into our house and taking a second shower. We socialized with friends only outside, investing in a firepit so we could gather in freezing temperatures.
As I advised my patients and the public on what we knew and didn't know about the coronavirus, I lived through the same uncertainty. The situation was constantly evolving. How we thought about risk changed as we learned that the virus was airborne, and it began to overwhelm hospitals. It changed again once vaccines and treatments became available.
I counseled people on how they could evaluate trade-offs as I did the same for my family. Was it safe to send kids back to school? Could we return to the gym? When was the virus risk low enough and the burden of isolation high enough that we could reduce self-imposed precautions?
Every decision was hard. I hoped there wouldn't be long-term consequences for the choices we made, initially to keep our children from socializing and then to return to school and resume playdates without masks. I prayed each time a member of our family tested positive for covid.
Five years later, my concerns are different. I worry that many have not learned the right lessons from the pandemic's devastation. I worry that people have forgotten about the more than 1.1 million Americans who died and the many more millions wrestling with long covid. I worry that, as our public health infrastructure gets dismantled with indiscriminate government cuts, we are even less capable of managing future threats. And I worry that the frightening times of Isabelle's first days could return.