Home / General / COVID two years in

COVID two years in

/
/
/
1626 Views

For a lot of people in the USA, this week marks the second anniversary of the psychological start of the COVID pandemic. This is obviously a personal kind of benchmark, but for me things got real on March 8, 2020, when the Indian Wells tennis tournament got canceled. I’m a big tennis fan, Indian Wells is probably the second-biggest annual event in the sport in the USA, and the tournament was the first major sports event in the country to get canceled, so that made quite an impression. This was on a Sunday night, and five days later every major sport around the world had been put on hold — that’s how fast things happened that week.

One guy wasn’t very worried though:

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

Good times.

Some thoughts, 1.2 million deaths in the USA later (That’s excess deaths, not just official COVID deaths. My calculation. I’ll show the math if somebody really wants to see it).

(1) We averaged 63,000 official COVID deaths during the first two months of this year, which is more than 50% above the monthly average for the pandemic, if we count the pandemic in America as starting two years ago this week.

(2) This is the case even though the vaccines remain incredibly effective — a non-vaccinated person had, on average a 25 times greater risk of dying from COVID in January than a boosted person. (These are the most recent available stats. Note that boosting makes a huge difference — the increase in mortality risk for a non-vaccinated compared to a vaccinated but not boosted person is seven times).

(3) Cases are down 95% from what they were at the peak of the Omicron wave two months ago, and are now at their lowest level since last July, which was the last time the pandemic was finally over if you can remember that far back.

(4) The mass psychology of mask-wearing is very interesting. The University of Colorado dropped its mask mandate yesterday and I would say something like 95% of students and 90% of faculty and staff stopped wearing masks immediately.

Apparently vaccination rates on campus are close to 100%, because the administration cleverly hid the fact that our vaccination mandate was completely hollow — you could avoid it by just saying you were “personally opposed” to getting vaccinated, I guess like you were personally opposed to the Cowboys winning the Super Bowl or something — by burying this fact in enough bureaucratic verbiage that almost everybody seems to have been under the impression that it was an actual mandate. This is probably the first time I’ve ever been grateful for university administrative bureaucratic fog — a noble lie at last.

Anyway, my impressionistic sense is that mask-wearing is very much a crowd-driven phenomenon, and that most people are just going to do what everybody else does. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of things work like that, for example fascism, unfortunately.

(5) At least I got a book out of it.

The first sign that something big was about to happen came on Sunday night, March 8. The ATP and WTA tours—the top levels of men’s and women’s professional tennis—announced that the BNP Paribas Open, scheduled to start the next day in Indian Wells, California, was canceled.

Indian Wells is the second-most prestigious tennis tournament held in the United States every year, trailing only the US Open. That it had been canceled at the last minute because of the COVID-19 epidemic sent a shudder through the sports world. Over the next week, the Indian Wells cancellation would prove to be a harbinger of unprecedented events in that world.

On Wednesday, March 11, NBA star Rudy Gobert received a positive test result for COVID-19. His team’s game was canceled immediately, just before the tipoff, and his teammates were quarantined in their locker room for several hours. Later that evening the NBA announced it was suspending its season indefinitely. The next day, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer followed suit.

Over the course of Thursday and Friday, all the major European soccer leagues suspended their seasons. The Champions League—roughly the Super Bowl of world club soccer—was also suspended. The PGA—host of the world’s top golf tour—suspended play on Friday.

Within five days, essentially all the world’s major sporting leagues and tours had shut down. As the fields were emptied and the stands went silent, the multibillion-dollar sports broadcasting and journalism world found itself with nothing to broadcast and only one story to cover.

This radical disruption of the previously dependable rhythms of the sports calendar was perhaps the earliest and most striking sign of the havoc the COVID-19 pandemic would wreak on the entire world. In retrospect the foresight of the major North American sports leagues was remarkable. They shut down before any government had issued stay-at-home orders, and when the total death toll from the virus in the United States was still less than fifty people.

Without that calendar, I became increasingly unmoored in time: like a druid without his monolith, I often lost track of what day of the week or even what month it was. Those of us not bound by the rhythms of agriculture have come to depend on all sorts of artificial markers of the passage of time, sports seasons key among them for many.

This book was written in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the games all went away, the significance of the countless hours I had spent over my half century as a sports fan came abruptly into sharper focus. Why do we deeply engaged fans choose to live our lives in this way? That suddenly seemed like a question worth asking.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,

Asleep on the black trunk,

Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.

Down the ravine behind the empty house,

The cowbells follow one another

Into the distances of the afternoon.

To my right,

In a field of sunlight between two pines,

The droppings of last year’s horses

Blaze up into golden stones.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”

James Wright

A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat (forthcoming August 2022).

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :