One year, half a million dead: The lessons we need from the last pre-pandemic weekend

What was your life like at this time last year?

You may not remember the details, but if you think back to the end of February 2020, or the first few days of March, you may remember that you still resided in the vanished land we now call normal. Most Americans did.

One thing I remember is that on Friday, Feb. 28, I wrote my first coronavirus column, a piece on how we needed to stop touching our faces if we wanted to avoid this new disease that didn’t yet have a formal name or explanation. “No face touching” was guidance from the experts, and it seemed worth sharing.

But fewer than half a dozen Americans had died of the virus at that point. If we’d heard about masks, it was only to be told we didn’t need them. Social distancing? Not in the common vocabulary. Lockdown? Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, that was something that happened only in prisons.

Even then, though, I felt a flutter of apprehension, the kind you feel when you sense a storm coming while the sky remains clear. I had flown back from New York earlier in the week and, noticing a guy in the airport security line wearing a mask, I’d thought, “Does he know something the rest of us don’t?” I registered the fear and then got on the packed airplane without a second thought.

That Friday night, after I finished my face-touching column, I headed without qualm to the Billy Goat Tavern in downtown Chicago for a farewell party for a couple of colleagues. Dozens of us crowded inside, drinking, laughing, crying a little, shaking hands, hugging. We probably touched our faces.

Superspreader event? Who had ever heard of that? Fortunately, as far as I know, that night didn’t turn out to be one — but a year later, I often think of how easily it could have.

I look back on that weekend as an anniversary of sorts, the anniversary of the last “normal” weekend, because even though I went out to dinner and to the gym the following weekend, it was with virus-induced anxiety. Since anniversaries are a nudge for reflection, today it’s worth reflecting on what we didn’t know a year ago, what we couldn’t allow ourselves to believe and what our ignorance then might teach us that’s helpful today.

Consider a few headlines from early 2020:

On Jan. 21, airports around the country widely began screening passengers for virus. Cases of the new respiratory illness were confirmed in U.S. On Jan. 30, Chicago reported the first person-to-person transmission of the novel coronavirus in the U.S. In early February, the first American died of COVID-19 in this country.

Soon, the American death toll climbed from six to nine to 11. Flight attendants started offering hand sanitizer to passengers, and hand sanitizer sold out at stores. Starbucks stopped using refillable cups. Finally, on March 11, the World Health Organization applied the name it had been avoiding: pandemic.

Let that sink in. In the course of a few winter weeks, we went from no known person-to-person transmissions in this country to a declaration of pandemic.

Now here we are a year later. Late winter 2021. A few days ago, President Joe Biden ordered flags lowered to half-staff on all federal buildings to mark the COVID-19 deaths of more than 500,000 Americans.

Half a million people. Each one of them was a person, and most of them, it’s safe to assume, were loved by others who are now in mourning.

Endless words have been spent on how much we’ve all lost in this year of death and disease, how much this time has changed us, individually and collectively. Our imaginations have been stretched to the limits, and it’s still too soon to understand all the ways such vast loss has changed us.

Now here we are a year later, with hope on the horizon. Vaccines have arrived. We hear predictions of a return to gathering, to travel, to a life that resembles what we remember.

But if there’s one lesson to take from the last normal weekend, it’s this: We’re not as smart as we think we are. This virus and its new strains will outfox us if we aren’t careful. Careful means continuing to wear masks and keep our distance and wash our hands, to endure these precautions a while longer.

We’re a lot wiser than we were a year ago, but we need to stay aware of how much we don’t know.

This story was originally published March 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "One year, half a million dead: The lessons we need from the last pre-pandemic weekend."