The year of living dangerously

I suspect that for a lot of people this week marks the one year anniversary of the real beginning, for them at least, of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It certainly does for me: Today is the one-year anniversary of the last time I ate in a restaurant, and the last day in 2020 that our son went to school. Looking back at the LGM archives, I realized that the thing that drove home to me that this was really going to be a calamity was, oddly enough, the cancellation of the Indian Wells tennis tournament, the second-biggest event in the sport held inside the United States. The 2020 version was canceled on Sunday, March 8th. This was the first big sporting event in the US to be canceled. Five days later pretty much the entire sports world had shut down, even though the next week noted epidemiologist Richard Epstein was still assuring us that the total death toll from COVID-19 in the USA would be around 500 people.

I got my first Pfizer shot this morning. I went to high school just a few miles down the road from the facility that has produced America’s Pfizer vaccine supply, and my first love was a girl whose stepfather worked there when it was owned by UpJohn, so the whole event had considerable emotional plangency on multiple levels.

This thread is for talking about whatever you want to talk about relating to any aspect of your experiences during the Great Pandemic.