I find that very early period, sort of Feb-Apr 2020, particularly odd to look back on because so many people I know seem to have *completely* erased it from their memories, and written over it with a copy of the second lockdown.
I remember in Feb, I think, I was still quite new in my job, and I was filling in our "weekly wellbeing tracker", which had a section where we could note anything non-work-related that was causing us distress. I wrote that I was worried about COVID. Later that day, I went back and deleted it, realising the tracker wasn't anonymous, and not wanting to look racist. At the end of the day, I decided that wasn't how I wanted to live my life, and went and put it back in.
But I've talked to people who I went through that period with quite closely, due to work or academic contacts mostly, and also other friendships, and generally they strenuously deny the whole existence of that uncertain period, where someone in my position might have had that worry. It's not that they think I in particular was being oversensitive to worry, they deny anything like that could *possibly* have been a concern, because their memory of the political valence of COVID has been back-projected from later on, after it settled down.
I also remember a group chat I was in with a whole bunch of people from what was at that point my old office, but which I was still quite connected with, where one day people were arguing about masks. Are they just useless, or are they actively dangerous, was the argument. I ventured a tentative suggestion they might be in some cases useful. I said I wasn't convinced people were interpreting the "masks don't work" studies properly, and that I thought, on balance, wearing one was probably better than not. This was not received particularly well.
Not only would all those people spend half of the next two years wearing masks, many people I know strenuously deny that any such conversation could have taken place, or if they aren't those people themselves, suggest I must have had the bad luck to have had an office (an academic office!) bizarrely chock-full of vaccine-denial types. They don't remember the early mask debates at all.
Arguing with them about it is such a disconcerting experience that I gave up fairly quickly. Sometimes these arguments were only a year or so removed! But so many people just seem to have back-projected the grindy, long later pandemic of grim repetition, predictable internet arguments with the usual suspects, and well-entrenched ideas of who the good guys and bad guys were, over the earlier period where nobody knew what was going on from day to day.
I say this not to do a bit of a victory lap about getting "Covid is bad" and "Masks help a bit" right a little while before the zeitgeist. I wasn't *that* far ahead of the curve and it's not like I did very much with my forward-thinking wins. I voluntarily locked mostly down about 4 days before the UK legal hammer hit - still far too late to be a proper suppression lockdown even if everyone else had followed me in - and I bought a mask a few weeks before almost everyone else but then didn't really go about wearing it in a sensible or well-considered way until much later - and I got other stuff wrong like stocking up on Vitamin D, which turned out not almost certainly not help.
I mention it because I at least *remember* how confusing and disorienting it all was, and how much of a growing-up period it was for me, how much I learnt in that short period about how "scientific consensus" works and what it means in practice, and it's extremely heartening to see that you remember it too, because somehow I really think most people don't! Like Bush with his false memory of actually seeing the plane hit the tower (I can't remember exactly the configuration but he claimed to see something there's no way he could have seen) that gets the 9/11 truthers so excitable, so many people have just constructed their memories out of contextual cues, other people's claims, and later memories that have back-written over the early pandemic to make it make more sense, like when you think back on memories of a friend who wears glasses now and keep remembering them wearing glasses longer ago than they really did.
It's really tough to think back on, because really we need to learn from this, and do better next time, but we can't do that if most people literally can't remember those crucial weeks, and instead remember some collective delusion cobbled together from later memories.
"Once you back major government interventions, you can’t expect the state to adopt your own boutique framing of them." So true.
The way governments reacted to the threat of COVID seems to me to have been absolutely disastrous and the fact that things were so mismanaged has left me with almost no trust for authority. Now I cannot forget the extraordinary things people said about those who did not want to be vaccinated - the chilling self-righteousness that was exposed. Then there were the measures taken to restrict those who were at zero risk of infection - one of my children is a teacher and tells me that certain pupils never seemed to recover their joie de vivre after being taken away from school and then, when brought back, made to wear masks - pointlessly. As a citizen of Australia, I discovered that citizenship meant absolutely nothing - those citizens who were not in Australia were not allowed back for many months to their own country. Furthermore, Australians discovered that they weren't really Australians but Western Australians or Victorians or whatever, as states chose to close themselves off to their fellow citizens in other states.
Early on I remember listening to one of the people in charge in Sweden and thinking his remarks were monstrous, whereas now I realise he was absolutely right.
In short, my main feeling when I think of COVID is deep shame at my own stupidity and the ease with which I was panicked. I will never, I hope, be so silly again. The economic consequences seem almost impossible to recover from. Additionally, many of those I am fondest of haven't questioned any of the measures that were taken - and some even still use anti-bacterial hand solution, which, given it is anti-bacterial, not anti-viral, was always quite obviously of no use, even if one did still believe COVID a giant threat. There is a book by someone called Laura Dodsworth on the government response in Britain that is equal parts fascinating and depressing. Some of her stories of how deeply afraid people became are heartbreaking.
I am so sorry that you had that experience with your mother. Inhuman. Unforgiveable.
I find that very early period, sort of Feb-Apr 2020, particularly odd to look back on because so many people I know seem to have *completely* erased it from their memories, and written over it with a copy of the second lockdown.
I remember in Feb, I think, I was still quite new in my job, and I was filling in our "weekly wellbeing tracker", which had a section where we could note anything non-work-related that was causing us distress. I wrote that I was worried about COVID. Later that day, I went back and deleted it, realising the tracker wasn't anonymous, and not wanting to look racist. At the end of the day, I decided that wasn't how I wanted to live my life, and went and put it back in.
But I've talked to people who I went through that period with quite closely, due to work or academic contacts mostly, and also other friendships, and generally they strenuously deny the whole existence of that uncertain period, where someone in my position might have had that worry. It's not that they think I in particular was being oversensitive to worry, they deny anything like that could *possibly* have been a concern, because their memory of the political valence of COVID has been back-projected from later on, after it settled down.
I also remember a group chat I was in with a whole bunch of people from what was at that point my old office, but which I was still quite connected with, where one day people were arguing about masks. Are they just useless, or are they actively dangerous, was the argument. I ventured a tentative suggestion they might be in some cases useful. I said I wasn't convinced people were interpreting the "masks don't work" studies properly, and that I thought, on balance, wearing one was probably better than not. This was not received particularly well.
Not only would all those people spend half of the next two years wearing masks, many people I know strenuously deny that any such conversation could have taken place, or if they aren't those people themselves, suggest I must have had the bad luck to have had an office (an academic office!) bizarrely chock-full of vaccine-denial types. They don't remember the early mask debates at all.
Arguing with them about it is such a disconcerting experience that I gave up fairly quickly. Sometimes these arguments were only a year or so removed! But so many people just seem to have back-projected the grindy, long later pandemic of grim repetition, predictable internet arguments with the usual suspects, and well-entrenched ideas of who the good guys and bad guys were, over the earlier period where nobody knew what was going on from day to day.
I say this not to do a bit of a victory lap about getting "Covid is bad" and "Masks help a bit" right a little while before the zeitgeist. I wasn't *that* far ahead of the curve and it's not like I did very much with my forward-thinking wins. I voluntarily locked mostly down about 4 days before the UK legal hammer hit - still far too late to be a proper suppression lockdown even if everyone else had followed me in - and I bought a mask a few weeks before almost everyone else but then didn't really go about wearing it in a sensible or well-considered way until much later - and I got other stuff wrong like stocking up on Vitamin D, which turned out not almost certainly not help.
I mention it because I at least *remember* how confusing and disorienting it all was, and how much of a growing-up period it was for me, how much I learnt in that short period about how "scientific consensus" works and what it means in practice, and it's extremely heartening to see that you remember it too, because somehow I really think most people don't! Like Bush with his false memory of actually seeing the plane hit the tower (I can't remember exactly the configuration but he claimed to see something there's no way he could have seen) that gets the 9/11 truthers so excitable, so many people have just constructed their memories out of contextual cues, other people's claims, and later memories that have back-written over the early pandemic to make it make more sense, like when you think back on memories of a friend who wears glasses now and keep remembering them wearing glasses longer ago than they really did.
It's really tough to think back on, because really we need to learn from this, and do better next time, but we can't do that if most people literally can't remember those crucial weeks, and instead remember some collective delusion cobbled together from later memories.
"Once you back major government interventions, you can’t expect the state to adopt your own boutique framing of them." So true.
The way governments reacted to the threat of COVID seems to me to have been absolutely disastrous and the fact that things were so mismanaged has left me with almost no trust for authority. Now I cannot forget the extraordinary things people said about those who did not want to be vaccinated - the chilling self-righteousness that was exposed. Then there were the measures taken to restrict those who were at zero risk of infection - one of my children is a teacher and tells me that certain pupils never seemed to recover their joie de vivre after being taken away from school and then, when brought back, made to wear masks - pointlessly. As a citizen of Australia, I discovered that citizenship meant absolutely nothing - those citizens who were not in Australia were not allowed back for many months to their own country. Furthermore, Australians discovered that they weren't really Australians but Western Australians or Victorians or whatever, as states chose to close themselves off to their fellow citizens in other states.
Early on I remember listening to one of the people in charge in Sweden and thinking his remarks were monstrous, whereas now I realise he was absolutely right.
In short, my main feeling when I think of COVID is deep shame at my own stupidity and the ease with which I was panicked. I will never, I hope, be so silly again. The economic consequences seem almost impossible to recover from. Additionally, many of those I am fondest of haven't questioned any of the measures that were taken - and some even still use anti-bacterial hand solution, which, given it is anti-bacterial, not anti-viral, was always quite obviously of no use, even if one did still believe COVID a giant threat. There is a book by someone called Laura Dodsworth on the government response in Britain that is equal parts fascinating and depressing. Some of her stories of how deeply afraid people became are heartbreaking.
I am so sorry that you had that experience with your mother. Inhuman. Unforgiveable.