Lots of other people have been writing over the past few days about what was happening four years ago when the covid pandemic became real to us all. I'm not sure why four years seems like the interval to write about; maybe it's because 2020 was an election year and this echo of an election year is bringing it back. Will this happen next year, too, when it's the more usual "anniversary" year?
Anyway, it made me look back at my posts from four years ago. First, I realized I had to search the word "corona" instead of "covid" in order to find the first mention, so that was itself a minor reminder of how things have changed.
One brief post to point to is from March 9. I called it Before and After:
“Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate.”
—Michael O. Leavitt, former secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (under George W. Bush... he started early in 2005, before Hurricane Katrina)
The virus featured heavily in my February 2020 Twitter round-up (which I light-heartedly titled "Going Viral"). It looks as though my first mentions of coronavirus were in back-to-back posts about Mafia Mulligan's ineffective actions in response to the outbreak on February 25 and 26.
Of course, we now know all this was well after U.S. Senators had been briefed and some had sold their sensitive stocks, and Trump had given interviews to Bob Woodward explaining that he knew just how bad it was.
Meanwhile, I was about to enter a hellacious multi-month period of upheaval here in the Twin Cities that (personally) could have been much worse. No one died in my immediate circle, after all. Many others lost so much, and so many.
It's hard to remember just how bad it was except in the times when a memory sneaks through.
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