Lest we forget...
Now that Texas is “totally open,” meaning we’re back to pre-COVID business-asusual all over town. Masks are permitted but are not required. More tables are in place in restaurants. Bars are open. So are farmers markets. All services are available as usual and we are all free to crowd into small spaces as much as we like.
Bottom line, we’re at the tail-end of a pandemic that began with one case in the final days of December 2020.
Today, kids are back at camps as they were two years ago. Churches are open and have face-to-face services as well as full calendars of activities. Families are flying to vacation destinations here and abroad (mostly), slot machines in casinos around the country are back to their usual ringing rhythms and hospitality industry moguls are beginning to smile again. Ditto school kids. No more virtual classes.
Like most summers in memory, teens have parttime jobs, newly graduated seniors are poised to get fulltime jobs or begin military training and many are getting physicals, filling out final paperwork and getting ready to pack off to their firs year of college.
Book lovers can go back to the recently reopened bookstores, public and community libraries. Music lovers of all ages are, once again, loading their Google calendars with concert dates and buying advance tickets again. Movie marquees are lit, film festivals have returned and Broadway is open!
But is the pandemic really over?
Certainly not in every country. In Japan, for example, this year’s Olympians will be competing in front of relatively few fans. The UK is dealing with the variant Delta virus and some countries continue curfews and masking to prevent spread of the virus.
As of this past week, Texas has lost a total of 50,000 Texans to the deadly COVID-19 virus. In total, the state had recorded 2,970,822 cases of COVID. Thirteen million Texans had been fully vaccinated by mid-June, but new cases are being diagnosed and admitted to hospitals for treatment.
Population of the Lone Star State in 2021 is an estimated 29.2 million.
Last November, two Harvard economists – David Cutler and Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary – estimated the coronavirus pandemic would cost the U.S. at least $16 trillion if it ended by Fall 2021, timing they describe as “optimistic.”
Cutler added that the figure is conservative because it doesn’t include the pandemic’s differential impact on women, whose jobs are more seriously impacted by the need to juggle demands of being both remote workers and at-home teachers of children learning via videoconference — and who have been leaving the workforce in increasing numbers.
“This is a titanic event, and you just can’t treat it any other way than that,” Cutler added.
I mention these data because we need to remember: The costs of the pandemic of 2020-2021 were not small and shouldn’t be forgotten. In less than two years, 600,000 American lives were stolen. The victims didn’t have a chance. “One day they were fine, the next day,” as several nurses described, “they were dying.”
We must never forget those we lost to this horrific pandemic and those with underlying illnesses who COVID-19 served to give them the final push into their graves. Let’s remember those with COVID who died without their families at their bedsides as well as those selfless nurses and doctors who held the hands of their patients as their lives ended.
Let’s not forget the ravages of this pandemic as the burgeoning numbers of victims outpaced space in hospital morgues and the refrigeration facilities of medical examiners and funeral homes, calling for refrigerated storage vans.
We should also keep in mind the limitation of mourners at family visitations, services of remembrance and graveside rites.
We also may remember what we did to pass the time during quarantines and how our grocery stores somehow “turned on a dime” to offer curbside ordering and online shopping.
This terrible pandemic also taught us how much we value being with our friends, seeing family, enjoy going to the movies, having a nice meal at a restaurant and how well we can entertain ourselves in a pinch. We also learned about the convenience of telemedicine, how to find anything online and how much we appreciated a regular text from a friend or the ability to attend streaming services from our churches. In fact, in some instances, churches became better shepherds to their flocks, thanks to the assistance of digital media, texting, cell phones, etc.
The pandemic created a new normal for all of us. It changed all of us. But long after we squeeze into our new routines and increase our speed of life back to the limit, let us not forget those 600,000 Americans who were taken. Indeed, let us remember the first – and last – responders. Let us celebrate the time when there are no new cases of COVID, the end of the pandemic.
Yet, let us also remember and rejoice in the resilience and the strength of the American spirit that led us from the darkness of the pandemic and into the light of the new day.