Collected Item: “Living Through the Pandemic”
Give your story a title.
Living Through the Pandemic
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
text story, photograph
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
One thing that really stands out to me when I look back on the past two years since the pandemic began is how much fear there was at the onset. I remember it being about mid-March of 2020 and schools had moved to online learning, all nonessential businesses were closed, and it was almost impossible to find even basic groceries. The overwhelming majority of people were wearing some sort of face covering at this point and just the act of going outside felt dangerous. I should point out that since I work in the aerospace and defense manufacturing sector I was classified as an essential worker without the possibility of working remotely. Given that all of my friends had jobs that had moved to remote work and could isolate in their homes I felt that it was too risky to be around them given that I was out every day. I think that it is interesting that this was the state of affairs when there were maybe 1000 confirmed cases in the state of Arizona at this point. When contrasted with the reality that there have now been a total of over 2 million confirmed cases with approximately 25,000 currently active cases and for the most part everyone is going on with life as normal, I am left wondering if the fear at the beginning was irrational or if the current sense of complacency is the result of a society worn down to the point of indifference?
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
Arizona, isolation, essential worker, social distance, mask
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Mike Casey
Give this story a date.
2022-04-01