Daydream

Existing, Not Living, With Covid

I remember watching The Walking Dead years ago. I recall thinking about the constant state of hypervigilance everyone had to be in. The briefest moment of respite that we took for granted, like closing one’s eyes to breathe in fresh air and listen to the sound of a river, could cost you life or limb. I wondered what I would do in a world like that. I wondered if I would even want to live in such circumstances.

Fast forward to 2025. It is now year six of the Covid pandemic, and life feels very much like living in a cross between The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later. Only, the infected look just like you and me instead of making obvious zombie noises and presenting with a staggering gait and ragged clothing. They may or may not give clues as to their infection status by coughing, but after so many infections over so many years, a lot of people have developed chronic coughs now.

On the road is where you feel the 28 Days Later vibes of this dystopian hellscape. Road rage, tailgating, speeding, and running red lights and stop signs is just what you expect on every trip out. Multi-car pile-ups caused by a raging lunatic in a massive truck that had to pass three cars because they had the audacity to only be doing 50 in a 45 is a regular occurrence. People don’t know what to do at four-way stops anymore. About half of them just blow through, assuming they can because others are supposed to stop. The other half will sit there and wave everyone else though until someone behind them starts angrily honking, likely because they’ve had enough close calls for a lifetime. It’s all extremely anxiety-provoking, especially as the cost of insuring and maintaining a car soars.

And with infection control becoming lax, and Covid producing lasting immune damage in those infected, other infections are skyrocketing while Covid still comes in waves. We now have Norovirus in the mix, which causes violent illness for days and is hardy on surfaces possibly for weeks. Most of the things that effectively disinfect surfaces for Covid don’t work for Norovirus. And all of this would definitely be enough already, but now a H5N1 bird influenza is stirring. Poultry populations are being annihilated, sending the price of chicken and eggs through the roof in a cost of living crisis, and also drastically increasing the odds of a pandemic that spreads human-to-human while we’re still in the grips of another.

Except for what feels like an abysmally small group of people who actually understand what we’re facing, the world seems deeply divided into two distinct camps. One group believes Covid was all a freedom grab and isn’t actually dangerous. This group sees any mitigation as infringement upon their rights to live freely and make their own decisions. Many of them become incensed upon seeing anyone in a mask, and lash out verbally or even violently. The other group believes vaccines will spare them from the worst of the effects of Covid, even though plenty of vaccinated people have developed Long Covid, other conditions caused or worsened by the virus, or even died. These groups fight each other as pro-vax and anti-vax, and both largely ignore the bigger picture - and all of us trying to avoid the virus.

For the past 3 1/2 years, the goals of leadership were to get us out of precautionary thinking and back out there working and spending. Leadership and CDC locked in on downplaying the dire consequences we faced as Covid hit us in wave after wave. The emergency declaration was ended, and with it went precautions in healthcare and the insurance millions of Americans desperately needed amid the ongoing crisis. Information people needed to make informed decisions was obscured and data was manipulated to soft-pedal the threat. The bar was on the floor, and somehow it got lower. And with the new administration, there is no expectation for improvement on any of these fronts. If anything, the bar will likely dip even further.

Throughout the pandemic thus far, there have been many moments where I believed the people in power would have no choice but to reverse course and tackle the pandemic head on. And I have been wrong all those many times. When hospital infections soared in the wake of the removal of mask mandates in healthcare, I took this as undeniable evidence that they should be reinstated. The powers that be evidently did not agree. When illnesses in children were steeply increasing, causing record school absences, I felt certain this would spur action. Instead, it was treated as a truancy problem. When it became clear that Covid was causing neurological conditions and cognitive decline, shaving points off of IQ scores, I was sure parents would begin demanding safe schools for their children. To my shock and horror, they did no such thing. Perhaps all the years of bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills have numbed them to the harms their children face at school. I have no other explanation for this anomalous behavior of parents sending their children directly into harm’s way.

The world I believed I lived in now appears to all have been an illusion. I realize many people are still in it, and I have thus tried to be very patient with them waking up to the reality we all face since our pandemic-driven man behind the curtain moment. But I’m weary, and my patience has been spent to the point of debt. The exhaustion of carrying the entire weight of the social responsibility of an entire society while the vast majority carry none, even in places where safety should be a reasonable expectation (i.e. healthcare), has driven into me a deep moral injury from which I no longer believe I can heal. Whether it is highly-effective brainwashing or choice, I realize I need to find a way to keep trying to wake people up while also letting go of the hope of community with them until, or if, they ever do.

Letting go of the life I once knew, the dreams I once had, the hopes I once held for my children, is a sorrow so deep it knows no bounds and mere words fail me. I used to look forward to so many of the typical life milestones one does as a parent, while now I am mostly consumed with constant despair over what Covid has done to them, their lives, and their aspirations. I hoped my son would get into the college of his dreams. And he did. But now he struggles, following his fifth Covid infection. His mind is not the same. His heart has been permanently damaged, and the condition continues to progress. His lungs have been permanently damaged. And though I try to push it to the farthest corners of my mind because the thoughts are so unbearable, I can’t help but think how unsustainable all of it is and what that could mean.

All of this, it seems, comes down to money. We can’t have the emergency declaration because they don’t want to spend war money on healthcare. We can’t have work from home because they need to justify all that commercial real estate. We can’t keep doing Zoom meetings, because commuting means you’re spending on everything from fuel to snacks to clothes to maintenance of your car. We can’t have clean air, precautions in hospitals, safer schools, or real public health because it means acknowledging there is and has been a big problem and a threat to our safety - and this might cause us to spend less. The list is long, seemingly endless, dystopian, and frankly, really depressing.

I sometimes daydream of a simple, Covid-safe, homesteading kind of lifestyle with like-minded folks, a place where we could live normally, all have a place that gives our lives deep meaning and us a sense of belonging, and return to a less-complicated way of life where capitalism doesn’t dictate our worth and how we spend every waking hour.

But it is just a daydream.