2 days (overnight) - Wed, Sept. 9/Thurs., Sept. 10

3 days (over two nights) – Wed., Sept. 16/Thurs, Sept. 17/Fri, Sept. 18

2 days (overnight) - Wed., Sept. 23/Thurs, Sept. 24

The IDP (Iowa Democratic Party) Coordinated Campaign has prioritized 10 campuses in the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rdCongressional Districts.

The idea behind this targeted voter registration and mobilization effort is that over the next few weeks, college students will be coming to their schools, whether returning or arriving for the first time, from homes both in and outside Iowa. They may not be focused on voting, and if they are or can be motivated to vote, their voting residences are likely to be confusing for them, making them vulnerable to Trump-infused suppression efforts.

Here’s an inspirational guest essay in the New York Times - The Trump Administration Is Trying to Keep College Students From Voting. Don’t Let It

The goal is to elect as many of these five people as possible:

For Governor: Rob Sand

For US Senate: Josh Turek

For US House:

1st District (SE, Davenport) - Christina Bohannan (law prof, engineer, former state rep)

2nd District (NE, Cedar Rapids) - Lindsay James (Presb minister-state rep)

3rd District - (central-Des Moines) - Sarah Trone Garriott (Lutheran minister-state sen)

To take us through Sept., we’ve picked these campuses/cities, organized trips for different weekdays, and are teamed with student groups on the ground. We’ll be doing voter registration at tables on and off campus and at events. No expectation that we’ll do door-knocking canvassing. They’re also helping to find local hosts to house us.

We’re focusing for starters on these campuses/cities:

2 days (overnight) - Wed, Sept. 9/Thurs., Sept. 10 – Des Moines

Drake University and DMACC (Des Moines Area Community College) - 341 miles (5 hr drive)- 3^rd District

3 days (over two nights) – Wed., Sept. 16/Thurs, Sept. 17/Fri, Sept. 18 – Grinnell & Cedar Rapids

Grinnell College - Grinnell - 293 miles (4-1/2 hr drive)- 2^nd District

Coe College and Kirkwood Community College – 76 miles from Grinnell (1 hr drive)/ 254 miles back to Chicago (4 hr drive)- 2^nd District

2 days (overnight) - Wed., Sept. 23/Thurs, Sept. 24

St. Ambrose University - Davenport 180 miles (3 hr) and

University of Iowa - Iowa City - 54 miles from Davenport (1 hr/ 230 miles back to Chicago (3 hrs, 40 min)- 1^st District

If you’re interested in learning more, staying in touch, and joining us, please email back at j-doppelt@northwestern.edu. While you’re at, specify which dates you are prepared to commit to, and if you have a car at your disposal.

Look forward to going west, young-at-hearts and turning around the country, Jack and Margie

---

P.S.

Here are a few useful website references where you’ll learn, among other things, that in Iowa:

--Residents can register to vote online and track their registration online.

--Registered voters may vote by mail or vote in person, and track their absentee ballots online.

--Iowa has same day registration so people can register to vote (and vote) on election day.

--Iowa voters are required to show an Iowa driver’s license or other ID (U.S. passport, U.S. military ID or veteran’s ID, or Iowa voter ID card) before they can obtain an absentee ballot and before they can vote at polling places.

Iowa Elections and Voting

Voting in Iowa

The other priority campuses that we may do down the line, if our efforts are helpful and if we have the numbers and the stamina are:

1st-

Simpson College - Indianola - 357 miles (5 hrs, 30 min)

2nd-

University of Northern Iowa - Cedar Falls - 273 miles (5 hrs)

Luther College - Decorah - 285 miles (5 hrs)

The projected dates below are flexible and we’re including one weekend trip.

Week of Sept. 27-Oct. 3

Tues, Sept. 29

Wed. Sept. 30

Week of Oct. 4-10

Mon, Oct. 5

Tues., Oct. 6

Week of Oct. 11-17

Mon, Oct.12

Tues., Oct. 13

Weekend -

Oct. 17

Oct. 18

Week of Oct. 18-24

Wed, Oct. 21

Thurs., Oct. 22

Week of Oct. 25-31

Mon, Oct. 26

Tues., Oct. 27

Nov. 3

Election Day-same day registration

--------

That won't happen to us and we got no doubt
Too deep in love and we got no way out
And the message is clear
This could be the year for the real thing
https://lnkd.in/g7aYiu7z

Bittersweet memories
That is all I'm taking with me
So good-bye
Please don't cry
We both know I'm not what you, you need
https://lnkd.in/gzF_2jdp

Just when I'm about to make it work without you
You look into my eyes and light those dreamy eyes
And pretty soon I'm wondering how I came to doubt you
All you gotta do is smile that smile
And there go all my defenses
Just leave it up to you and in a little while
You're messing up my mind and filling up my senses
https://lnkd.in/g_HnU2Uk

Just when I'm about to make it work without you
You look into my eyes and light those dreamy eyes
And pretty soon I'm wondering how I came to doubt you
All you gotta do is smile that smile
And there go all my defenses
Just leave it up to you and in a little while
You're messing up my mind and filling up my senses
https://lnkd.in/g_HnU2Uk

Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I cannot compete with you
https://lnkd.in/gP4jJ39i

They didn't understand it
And I tried to make them see
That one is only poor
Only if they choose to be
Now I know we had no money
But I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me
https://lnkd.in/gVDSkc7Y

I'll be good to him, I'll bring love to him
Everyone says there'll come a day when I'll walk alongside of him
Yes just to know him is to love love love him
And I do
https://lnkd.in/gVUkGVrc

I've had years of cramped-up city life
Trapped like a duck in a pen
All I know is it's a pity life
Can't be simple again
Rocky Top, you'll always be
Home sweet home to me
https://lnkd.in/gy7JJXHu

With deep affection and appreciation, Lines n' Lyrix

COVID took a toll on more than we humans. Just ask a veterinarian.

Deirdre and Tom Farr have spent much of their lives in Des Moines, Iowa. They have five dogs. For years, a barn a few blocks away was home to Rio, their geriatric horse, who made it to 28.

Deirdre retired from her veterinary practice in 2019, shortly before COVID. Her specialty was acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and chiropractic. It was Tom, a recently retired insurance executive, who cared for Rio every day. It was “non-negotiable.”

Tom had inherited Rio. During COVID, Tom would walk into the barn, wearing a mask and take it off. In winter’s sub-freezing temperatures, the mask steamed up his glasses. Not a good idea to feed a horse you can’t see through fogged up glasses. Tom was uncomfortable taking off the mask. The barn attracted a steady stream of people and the owner “didn’t believe in science.” There were reports early on of COVID jumping species from humans to dogs and back, though Tom and Deirdre didn’t put any stock in it. The accounts were debunked and the rumors passed.

Deirdre paid attention to how animals were reacting to the altering sights and smells of the pandemic. They had a little, 13-year-old dog when COVID hit. Typically, Eleanor would lead Deirdre when they went for walks. As the streets emptied of people, cars, traffic, and activity, Eleanor got confused, seeming anxious. She’d begin to lead, then she’d freeze.

In her semi-retirement during COVID, Deirdre continued to treat pets outside, adapting her acupuncture. She saw first-hand how many people got dogs for the first time to deal with the pandemic isolation. Working with pets and their owners, Deirdre considers herself a people-oriented person. For her, the inability to connect with people left her feeling emotionally starved.

“We became dystopic hunters and gatherers,” she calls it. “Restaurants turned into drive up meals with drinks. We learned ways we never knew before to stay in touch with people.”

For Tom, the pandemic sunk in when he shopped. The grocery store shelves were empty, especially of toilet paper and handi wipes. As a history major in college, he’d studied the Black Death of 1348, a pandemic that reportedly led to the death of up to 50 million people, or 50% of Europe’s 14^th-century population. “For the first time in my life, I felt fear.”

He recalls thinking, what happens if we really run out of food? He says he should have had more faith in stockpiling but he didn’t. So much was unknown. “We can’t be this fragile.”

In adverse weather or storms in Des Moines, “everyone runs to grocery store.” Shelves, though, are full, he compares. It was “qualitatively different how empty the shelves became.” With the handi wipes gone, he got the type with Clorox in it. The consequence: serious skin rashes.

As “real believers” in science and modern medicine, both Tom and Deirdre are familiar with infectious disease. They followed the protocols they knew.

Since there was little trustworthy coming from the federal government, notwithstanding a declaration of a “National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak,”

Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak

Deirdre recounts getting up in the middle of nights and looking online for availabilities of vaccines or test kits. Tom harkens back to the polio vaccines when he was a kid in the ‘50s and ‘60s. They recall not being able get the vaccines fast enough.

Still, they had bad reactions from the Moderna vaccine so they switched to Pfizer. They know others who had unique reactions to one vaccine or another. Deirdre got COVID three times. She took Paxlovid and her COVID symptoms, she describes as “not a big deal.”

Tom jokes that at first he felt insulted that as a senior, he was considered at risk. But then again, he was able to get vaccines sooner.

One unanticipated, positive result for Tom was that due to social distancing, mask wearing and handwashing, “I went at least four years without so much as a ‘common cold.’”

He thought deeper about the notion of our collective experiences of COVID memories as a form of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). “Humans are innately social and that has been a survival technique,” he wrote. “In the early days of COVID so much was unknown and as people responded to the way in which they were ‘hard wired,’ that meant you would congregate even if exposed to a contagious and potentially fatal disease. You can readily see the internal conflict that would cause.”

#####

In one month in 2017, back-to-back hurricanes devastated Puerto Rico. Irma hit first on Sept. 6. Two-thirds of the island lost power. Maria followed. Then-President Trump issued a disaster declaration that freed up federal funds for recovery, for individuals, the government of Puerto Rico and its municipalities.

Three years later, as the island was trying to come back, this time it was a series of earthquakes.

In Chicago, Carolyn Tang Kmet partnered with Fundacion Unidos para Servir on the island and brought her students at Loyola University to execute Project IBIS. She created the project to design a prototype of free platforms to help communication during natural disasters.

Why IBIS?

The ibis is the last bird to take shelter before a storm, and the first to emerge after a hurricane.

When they arrived on the island, 94,000 Puerto Ricans (36.2% of residents) were unemployed. They busied themselves matching resources with needs and creating distribution plans. They mapped who has fresh water, a working generator, and created forms and spreadsheets with locations by latitudes and longitudes. Many homes were built on family property, with no formal deeds and no standard addresses. The norm was go “up that hill, turn right when you see the footpath.” The project fit right into what became known as Puerto Rico’s Great Toilet Paper Shortage.

As she and the student outreach team were finalizing the project, COVID hit. On March 13, Puerto Rico closed all public schools and several universities, switching to remote education. Stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines were in place two days later. Puerto Rico went through three health secretaries that month.

About a week after Carolyn returned home, she woke up in the middle of the night realizing that the COVID PPE (personal protective equipment) shortage was a structurally identical problem to the Puerto Rico disaster relief project. The common challenges are connecting hyperlocal resources to hyperlocal needs, and optimizing delivery time.

In Chicago, the most immediate needs were masks. Carolyn connected with The Clare, a well-known retirement living facility situated on the Loyola’s Water Tower Campus. The Clare was where Sister Jean lived. At the time, Sister Jean was 100 years old and coming off a spectacular year as inspirational chaplain of the Loyola Rambler basketball team that made it into the NCAA final four. Sister Jean had organized a PPE donation network for Northwestern Hospital and the Clare had run out of masks.

Carolyn converted the forms her team had prepared in Puerto Rico and retrofitted them for Chicago, complete with geo-coded maps. Carolyn’s team got a list from the city to validate what places had resources. Loyola students called every entity on the city’s licensing list and figured out who needed what. Teams of women volunteered to make masks. Random assembly pods surfaced.

The Clare submitted a request and the network came through. The network distributed 11,000 masks to 150 entities, for a total of 500 users.

Though the Chicago version didn’t get scaled, it made its mark as: Enabling Community-Driven Response with ArcGIS. Loyola University Chicago, Quinlan School of Business: Illinois Face Mask Effort. The effort empowered communities at a hyperlocal level, minimized language barriers, and absorbed multiple layers of information simultaneously.

As COVID became palpable at grocery stores, Carolyn began feeling “an intensity of guilt.” Her daughter Kenzie had just started kindergarten, her husband was in grad school, she was teaching at Loyola, they lived in Evanston and they didn’t know any families near them. She felt she couldn’t be Kenzie’s mom 100% of the time and found herself in the space of “not enough.”

She wrote a blanket email to the parents from Kenzie’s day care, seeking to form a pod. Two families responded, so three families of five kids who hadn’t known one another formed a pod. It wasn’t too long after they met for the first time that they figured out how to go dancing together.

COVID began to dominate the news. Carolyn, who is Chinese, and an integrated marketing communications professor, now at Northwestern, was detecting disturbing patterns.

She began jotting down notes. This reflection popped into her head and onto the page: “I wouldn’t be who I am today if I set my worth by how others view me.”

As early as March 20, the first week of the virus, she took note of a Time Magazine story that featured a photo of a close-up of Trump’s notes indicating how, in his White House speech the day before, the word “Corona” was replaced with “Chinese” Virus.

One day, Kenzie returned home from play group. At 6 years old, she had not thought of herself as Chinese or not. They’d never talked about it. Their half-Chinese daughter asked her parents why Donald Trump “doesn’t like Chinese girls.” Carolyn and Jeff were flabbergasted. How did she get that? Apparently, a play group classmate noticed that Kenzie looks Chinese and told her that the president doesn’t like her.

That opened up a family conversation. She likes Chinese food. “Her stomach is 100% Chinese.” But, is she Chinese? They told her she can be proud of being Chinese.

Carolyn always thought of herself as a model minority Chinese American, the kind who’s smart in school, seldom in trouble, supposed to be good in math. She felt it was a shame that the first time Kenzie realized she was Chinese, her extraverted, naturally ebullient daughter also realized she was a racial minority and one not liked.

Carolyn drew the natural conclusion that the play group kid got it in some way from her parents, not from other kids or from the play group staff. As she wrote a letter to the play group hosts to inform them, she felt guilty. Why did I put her in that situation?

Carolyn became sensitized. Her periodic doodling observed: “There seems to be a rash of violence against Asians lately.” She wrote: “That’s the news, the news is spreading hate. Don’t tell me that the media is fanning the flames, tell me how they’re putting them out.” She quoted from news stories: …”overrun with cheap Chinese-made goods.” She wondered, why doesn’t it say, “overrun with low-quality imports.”

When she drove past a bus stop in the neighborhood, she noticed anti-Chinese graffiti.

Becoming furious, she went home and got paint and brushes to paint over it. By the time she got back, a white guy was there with a paint brush and a bucket, already painting over it. She recalls thinking, “there are good people and bad people in the world. Glad the good step up.”

Another time, she drove by a nearby school. Safety tape had been woven into a chain-linked fence. It read: “WE STAND BY OUR CHINESE STUDENTS.” She recalls tearing up. “As model minorities, we never heard about allies.”

At one point deeper into the pandemic, her parents in California weren’t answering the phone. They didn’t have a housekeeper. They could be dead. With no way to reach them, she drove the 2,000 miles by herself. Before departing, Carolyn took a COVID test. She put a mattress in her Prius and drove out, making sure she was self sufficient and wouldn’t need to deal with anyone along the way. She didn’t get there as smoothly as she’d envisioned.

In Missouri, it was Carolyn in a little white Prius and all the truckers on the road. As she found out later, deer tend to jump across the highway. “A deer saw my little Prius and went smash right on top.

“Here I am in the South, a Chinese girl in the middle of COVID in a 2013 Prius. I pull over to the side and I’m hyperventilating. A cop pulls up behind me. I’m scrambling for a mask. He doesn’t have a mask. And he says in that Southern twang, ‘What happened?’ I cannot tell you how aware I became of my own biases.

“I just assumed from Kenzie’s experience what would happen to me. No masks. Instead, I got true Southern hospitality. I never felt anything but kindness and authentic respect. They extended everything for me. Missouri took care of me. They were amazing. The cop stayed with me until I calmed down, got a tow truck driver with me, made sure I was okay and asked if I’d seen the damage.”

She hadn’t. She was too scared. “When I told him I was too scared, he didn’t judge or condescend. He simply nodded and went to the front of my car to check out the damage himself.” He didn’t ask her to get out of the car. She stayed in the car where she felt safe. “He made me feel safe when my heart was pounding a thousand beats a minute.” He told her the car wasn’t drivable, that it’s not safe, and advised her what hotel to stay in.

She told the car dealership she was trying to get to California. She got a rental and drove the rest of the way. The dealership didn’t total the car.

She made it to California.

“My dad answers the door. I said, ‘Why don’t you answer the phone?’ Oh my God, parents do a number on your head. I stayed with them for two weeks.”

Her plan was to drive back to Missouri, pick up the car and drive home. But the car wasn’t ready. So she drove home and went back to pick up the car, bringing with her “a ton of stuff from Chicago.”

A lesson COVID reinforced for her: Community matters.

####

My spirits lifted the moment my wife Margie and I emerged from the parking lot underneath the Obama Center in my sweet home Chicago.

Staff, mostly in matching blue, were all over like saplings planted to spruce up the place, smiles radiating until my eyes picked up the next radiating lighthouse a few feet away. They let us wander but weren’t about to let us get lost in the undulating paths that might whisk us into some gardens or lookout points. To the east, the Wooded Island that I’d known as a bird sanctuary. More welcoming to migratory birds now than I remembered. Next to it, the Darrow Bridge and the Museum of Science and Industry, one of Chicago’s must see tourist destinations. To the west, the Midway Plaisance, a long swatch of grass whose name rolls off the French tongue with a wink, cuts through the University of Chicago and ushers in the city’s network of boulevards. All dating back to the World’s Columbian Exposition in the 1890s. To the south about a block away is the Obama basketball court building that butts up against one of the city’s once neglected neighborhood ball fields and golf courses. Over that and stretching for miles of virtually unobstructed viewing to the Indiana border is Chicago’s South Side, which though ethnically diverse is all too often invoked as synonymous with Black and dangerous. My kinda town.

As my eyes drift to my fellow visitors, it’s apparent that the staffers aren’t the only ones in a good mood. Everyone I see is beaming, bopping, ebulliently connecting as they walk by. These are my people. They are the one America that Obama called out in his landmark 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address. To describe them as multi-racial, multi-ethnic or multi-cultural is to dampen the mood.

When I asked a waitress in the café if she likes her job, and if so, what does she like about it, she said, “the people and the energy.” Nailed it.

The grown ups shmoozed randomly; the kids indulged me. Which person’s going to open the door for me next? The parents were smiling and apologizing unnecessarily for their kids who scampered past, around and through the grown-ups. They were raised to mind their elders without deadening their spirit. Connection is contagious. There were niches and corners everywhere for kids to hole up.

I couldn’t really tell the locals from the tourists, except maybe by their caps and t-shirts. One t-shirt read: “Make Chicago great again, with a photo of Harold Washington.

Peoples’ caps were from everywhere, dozens of teams, with White Sox caps predominating.

T-shirts showcased every pastime; camps, travel clubs, schools.

As I traversed the museum, taking in the Obama memories and quotes, I kept glancing over at families, wondering, is it the past that they’re celebrating and sharing with their kids or is it the future that they’re anticipating and injecting into their kids?

And I kept humming the words to The House I Live in.

What is America to me?
A name, a map, or a flag I see
A certain word, democracy
What is America to me?

Oh, there you are, Peter.

#####

As a clinical social worker, Anne Slonim Rafal had built up years of interpersonal trust with her clients.

Within a week of her birthday on March 10, 2020, she stopped going into her office in Fairfax County, VA. She never returned.

COVID had put its imprimatur on therapy almost immediately and began insinuating itself into how people dealt with life, relationships, therapy and anxiety. Anne and the rest of her field had to play catch up.

Shortly before COVID surfaced, the Falls Church News Press published a story, Gender Therapists Offer Critical Help to LGBTQ Clientele in which Anne observed, “One challenge is having workplace, friends and family understand and accept who [these LGBTQ individuals] are…That can take time. It’s hard for people who have come to that decision to come out in person and must bide their time while others come to terms with it.”

For clients with a gender-related focus, COVID wreaked havoc with time. For their therapists like Anne, time was not on their side. There were new roadblocks, new practices and often increased anxieties.

Anne began keeping a diary, as the practices of therapists moved in a hurry to telehealth. The shift, she wrote, “becomes more complete each day. How long this new type of counseling will be the only safe counseling method is totally unknown.” It took people’s anxieties with them and often accentuated them.

“Many sole practitioners, like me, were scurrying to choose an affordable video enabled platform that met medical privacy requirements to provide their services,” she continued. “I chose Doxy.me. [link added] All my test runs with family went smoothly. Not so smooth when Monday morning hit and the system was jammed with a new world full of virtual workers. My first client simply couldn’t get on and did not want to use the phone. The next day one client preferred the phone due to lack of privacy in her home, with two college kids at home. And the phone wasn’t a good alternative for me, as I had trouble hearing.

She recalls one LGBT client who wanted to come out and couldn’t meet with her employer in person to do so. A woman who was pregnant worried because her husband couldn’t go to medical appointments.

People were coming up with family rules on social distancing that often clashed on what’s safe. Mostly, she observes now, people tended to “go with the most strict guidelines to ease the more anxious among members. Negotiations came up all the time.”

Anxiety was embedded into daily interactions.

Anne’s mom and aunt were adjusting to different assisted living facilities. She was not allowed to see either of them due to COVID-related CDC guidelines. She’d visit her mom and look in from outside the window. It was confusing for her mom with dementia, who kept asking for her to come in.

Three years later when her mom was dying, Anne was finally allowed to visit for five days.

Anne reported in her diary how adaptations were changing social work, many permanently. Online therapy took getting used to. Some of the disturbances in the field eventually evolved into common practices. Initially, the listserv that reaches thousands of clinicians was replete with questions and comments about which codes to use for telehealth, which insurances would reimburse for telehealth and which wouldn’t, Anne wrote at the time.

Therapists are limited to serving clients only in the states where they’re licensed. In the tri-state area and DC where Anne practiced, clinicians might be licensed only in one state. This worked when all clients came into an office within the state where you hold a license, Anne wrote. But with online therapy during COVID, what if your home from where your clients now receive services aren’t where you’re licensed. No clear answers manifested at first.

Anne was licensed in Virginia. As COVID endured, she received many referrals only to find they lived in Maryland.

The changes were hardest on the clients already dealing with anxiety and depression. The uncertainties left many tired and more stressed, Anne wrote. “Given the additional stress and new format of counseling, some clients opted for either shorter sessions, or just the opposite, sometimes more frequent online telehealth sessions.”

Some therapists turned to telephone counseling. Others experimented with walking outside with clients. Psychiatrists with whom she conferred reported more need for Xanax to address the added anxiety. They confided that they prescribed more sleep medicine, like trazodone or Ambien. Psychiatric hospitals changed their protocols. For example, she wrote, “one hospital in Salem, Virginia, has 60 beds. They adapted to a new rule for maximum gatherings of only 10, while medical residents attended rounds remotely.” In-patient admissions decreased to match the 10-patient group therapy limitation. Client issues were aggravated by social distancing. One 60-year-old transgender patient delayed coming out in person with coworkers and family.

Obstacles morphed into challenges. Her sessions with a couple - a husband and wife were disrupted by the need to tend to their 20-month-old. That is, until the husband announced: “I don’t. Want. To. See. Myself on camera.”

With telehealth, one client chose to be outside on a cell phone because her husband was working inside. The client who only recently had discovered her pregnancy was torn between pure joy and emotions laced with fear. Would her doctors’ appointments be safe for her, recognizing that clinic regulations prevented her husband from joining in the appointments. She wondered: What about the baby and the virus?

Financial concerns raised questions about therapists lowering rates or dropping out altogether. Anne reinstated her participation with an additional insurance provider to help alleviate patient costs.

For her young adult clients, what was safe in dating and touching relative strangers? Many young adults were back home with their parents for first time in years. Clients who had left couple counseling returned after five years.

For older clients, one in her 70s, with severe anxieties went to the emergency room with mild symptoms, was refused a COVID test, became irate, went to a private practice, was given a test, which came out negative. Her anxiety spiked. She believed there was still a 30% chance of a false negative.

Recurring themes were stressing over family reunions, weddings, and memorials that required flying when restrictions were in place and events would surely include unvaccinated relatives.

Anne adjusted to the online imperatives and welcomed conveniences. She was asked to join an online women’s support group. They met at least weekly and planned diversionary activities like dressing as a favorite character in a book. Her social contacts spread to other cities.

She asks herself now, what have therapists learned? With technology evolving and COVID entrenching then waning, telehealth made it possible and financially doable to reach clients who might not have been previously connected due to mobility and time constraints. Rural areas now have more coverage. Though costs are still an issue, insurance companies now regularly pay for remote telehealth sessions.

In Virginia, social workers are soon to benefit from interstate compacts, a privilege psychologists already have access to. This allows a therapist to practice in many states and allows therapy across state lines.

Gradually in the profession, new platforms have developed to reach children online with applications for play therapy and other interactive activities.

Clients now have a choice to receive therapy, all in person, all online or a hybrid of some in person and some counseling online.

Anne never developed COVID. During COVID’s official 3+ year stretch in the US, she and her husband moved from Falls Church to Charlottesville. They built a new house, where in her semi-retirement, she continues to write, paint, and prepare therapy workshops.

######

A full COVID shutdown was imminent. Staff at the Hektoen Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing medical education and scientific inquiry, were instructed to schedule time to go to the office when no one else was there to get whatever was needed to work from home for what they estimated to be a couple of months.

Levi Moore worked there as a public affairs professional, in what’s known as the Illinois Medical District on Chicago’s near west side. He took a ride share to the CTA’s Pink Line. He was the only one on the platform and the only one in the train car. He got off at State & Lake in the heart of the Loop. It was about 1 pm. There was no one in sight and it looked like a ghost town. All he saw was a bus in the distance.

“It felt like I was in a zombie movie,” Levi recounts. “That is when the enormity of the pandemic really hit me.”

_{Photos Levi Moore took of the empty mid-day el platform}

For years, Levi and a group of college buddies would get together for drinks on Thursdays or Fridays. Once COVID kicked in, they adapted their camaraderie to Zoom cocktails on Friday evenings. One Thursday, about a month before vaccines came out in Dec. 2020, the group got a text informing them that one of them was in the hospital, apparently with COVID. On Sunday, they shared another text. CB had died.

The suddenness has stuck with Levi, as has the unspoken permanence. He thinks of his time as the Executive Director of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum (now called NVAM). “People don’t want to recall. They don’t want to go back there,” he says. With COVID as with combat veterans, “people put memories in a metal box.”

A lot of Vietnam vets didn’t have PTSD until they got on with their lives, retired from work and had time to remember, Levi says. “Then the metal boxes flew open.”

Levi recalls that when he was vaccinated, that night he slept for 11 hours straight. “It was from relief.”

His work for Hektoen during COVID turned to the formidable and frustrating task of contact tracing. They partnered with 42 community-based organizations to reach diverse populations, setting up decentralized hubs to get to hard-to-reach people – those with food insecurity, disabilities, and the many who distrusted government and medicine. Neighborhood groups were more trusted. They matched workers with populations who spoke the same language.

He was well suited for the effort. He’d grown up in East St. Louis, a town in southern Illinois whose population, overwhelmingly Black, of more than 80,000 in 1960 plummeted to 18,000 by 2020. His dad was a cop; his mom was a school teacher. His world view took into account repressing traumatic experiences.

Most of his lifelong buddies he made in college at Northwestern University. He tended to disagree with how other journalism students approached issues, and after graduating, he worked in Illinois government and transitioned to lobbying and advocacy work and now into public health, focusing particularly on the intersection of technology and health.

Like Levi Moore, the Hektoen Institute is dedicated to ensuring that remembrances of COVID not stay buried. One of its major initiatives is the global COVID-19 Monument of Honor, Remembrance, and Resilience, both a physical monument in Chicago, and a virtual monument website.

_{The site explains why the monument is being erected}

The monument itself is to being erected in the Illinois Medical District, near Levi’s office, at 2023 W. Ogden Avenue (West Polk Street and South Damen Avenue), nestled between Stroger Hospital and the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. Its dedication is expected this fall.

Tributes on the monument are to be go out to healthcare workers, first responders, and essential employees who served during lockdowns.

#####

“I’m stuck in this place, but what am I wondering about?” – Dana Wade

Jena and Dana worked together in a public grade school in Skokie, outside Chicago when COVID surfaced in March 2020.

Both artistic, for more than 20 years, Dana Wade taught art classes, Jena Doolas was the school social worker.

That March, Dana was walking along the lakefront and at Montrose beach, she took a photo that inspired a work of art:

The calm Dana captured on that walk was about to be disrupted.

For Jena as a social worker, school during COVID began to feel “more cage than nest.” Teachers called on her for social and emotional learning support for their online learning platforms. She was there for colleagues and their families whose loved ones were dying; the first in April 2020.

Dana sensed that the system was grinding to a halt. In teaching art online on a screen, she couldn’t assume kids had supplies at home, even plain brushes. She took to starting classes “with a weird drawing prompt, like skateboarding on a mountain.” She’d have students draw instead of paint. The need to adapt, to be resourceful became a driving force.

For Jena, COVID spawned unique iterations of online therapy sessions with students. Kids who had attendance issues during the pandemic seemed to reserve time for therapy. Their executive functioning kicked in. They needed to remember their appointment times and boot up the computer. The sessions made them feel safer. They used sessions to connect with classmates. They created what they needed.

One time, a kid brought his super soaker guns to the online session to share with classmates he hadn’t known in class settings.

One day, Dana and Jena were at a park, social distancing. They commiserated about how the stress of COVID, of working and parenting through it, had brought on their own blank canvas syndrome, in which they feared COVID was squelching their creativity.

They hatched an idea. They’d collaborate, as if they were creating “mini-murals.” With murals, usually one person draws it and others opt in as if they’re completing a coloring book. Their collaboration would be more of a remote conversation, replacing the daily interactions they had at school in person.

They lived a few miles from each other in Chicago. Jena lived just south of downtown; Dana lived in West Rogers Park, on the way more or less to the Skokie school. Though Jena held therapy sessions online, she regularly drove to the school to work there. School rule.

They would draw and paint on the same canvas. Though they have different artistic styles, they were literally on the same page. Melding their styles into the same responsive paintings spawned its own technique.

Jena’s tends toward the political, symbolic and metaphorical. She refers to it as “witness paintings, as if to say, ”I’m seeing you and holding your inner worlds.”

Dana’s is more whimsical, with a sense of dreaming. During COVID, a through line for her became: “I’m stuck in this place, but what am I wondering about?”

Each would commit something to paper then they’d coordinate a hand off. Jena would drive to Dana’s, they’d meet briefly on the porch, and consummate the exchange. Sometimes they’d meet at the Lunt beach after 7 pm when the lifeguards were gone. They’d bring their kids.

Dana recalls going to the beach every morning during covid. They climbed trees.

“Beaches are magical. There are unlimited things to do for kids,” Dana offers.

Dana and Jena weren’t creating in a vacuum. Their students were along for the creative journey, as were their own kids. Dana would often have her kids do projects first, then she’d bring them into class, where her students would make their own contributions.

The pieces are infused with the handiwork of the kids, who capture things “fresher and purer.” Their words and doodles are recreated as collages and dream-like imagery. Colorful and floral.

COVID is represented in the pieces, some explicitly, some in spirit. The calm of water and nature, as captured by Dana at Montrose beach recur.

As do the disruptions of an unpredictable pandemic. COVID was a reset, often terrifying. “You can feel the emotions adults are going through being pushed aside by the kids’ contributions,” Dana says.

Life went on. “Not just go, go, go, but go in an unhealthy way.”

Dana’s dad died in late 2020, Jena’s mom died a few months later; both during COVID, but not from COVID. Dana confronted her own mortality, deciding to “undergo preventative surgery in light of the stark reality of her role as sole caretaker of her three daughters.” At least, she recounts, she got to spend time with her dad in his final days.

“The show must go on!” as they put it on Jena’s website, through “the confusion of urgent work, dire health threats, the push for mindfulness, positivity [and] healing.”

The collaborative pieces are layered with the wacky and the serious, with meaning and material. “They have to be,” Dana muses, “with more than one creator.” They sometimes can’t recall who did what. The streams of consciousness are literally visible. In the paintings,

There’s one with a whale that might appear whimsical and happy, Dana describes. The whale is in its element but beneath a brewing storm that roils the water below. Fish are ascending on the left alongside a reverse rain. The painting next to it draws on similar imagery. A conspicuous electric tower recalls Dana’s childhood trauma when her brother was struck by lightning and died when she was 19. The COVID virus and lungs lurk at the bottom.

Along the journey, Jena created a painting for Dana about her brother who died. Out of that, they created a triptych that speaks to liberation and freedom in different stages in their lives.

Throughout their COVID-inspired collaboration, Jena and Dana grappled with the question of when is a piece done? Or when is the conversation done? They sometimes felt they needed to quiet down the pieces.

Throughout their COVID-inspired collaboration, Jena and Dana grappled with the question of when is a piece done? Or when is the conversation done? They sometimes felt they needed to quiet down the pieces.

COVID changed Dana and is still changing her. She believes that with COVID, we have collectively swept things under the rug. “It’s crazy, simplistic,” she says. “We have to process.” The pandemic gave her “spaciousness” to say, “I don’t want this anymore.”

In looking back via the paintings, Jena notes the many unexpected objects that make an appearance--they did a lot of chairs, empty chairs, conjuring meetings with no one there. There are messages of loss, transformation, grounding and more.

Made up words – creations of the kids – are part of the story, as if stamped in as an exercise in e-learning.

There are clouds, upside down clouds and rain. There are also umbrellas, offering protection that don’t protect.

Bicycles promise the hope of freedom.

In all, Jena and Dana completed about 50 collaborative COVID works over a span of two years.

They had no intention of doing anything further with the project. Jena retired. None of the pieces had even been framed. They sat in a portfolio of papers. Though she works part-time, Jena has a little more time on her hands. She got frames at Goodwill, refurbished them, and framed the paintings.

Now framed, the paintings present as a collection of 50 works of art. Dana and Jena rented space for an exhibit and gave the collection a name: Conversations We Carry, paintings in the time of COVID. They named each painting. “Tributaries.” “From Every Direction.” “When Will We Go Up?”

The exhibit runs this week from July 23-27 at Space 900 in Evanston.

They’re still working on one piece. They think they might pick up on it as they host the exhibit. They can pick up where the technique left off without needing to execute a porch-based exchange.

“You can’t talk about COVID enough,” Jena believes. The impact and the change from COVID hasn’t been looked into enough, she adds. She recently attended her daughter’s graduation from college. Jena was blown away. Her daughter was in high school during COVID. “There’s our 15-year-old (at 22),” she thought, as if COVID had stopped time.

#####

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When Bob Shuford walked into the room as COVID took hold, he often came with an ipad.

As chaplain at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, just north of Chicago’s city limits, his mission was to dispense emotional and spiritual support for patients and family. To delve empathically into experiences of loss and suffering, he’d honed the subtle skills of being a good listener.

One on one with a patient, the key, Bob says, is to make a “safe connection” so the patient feels free to be who they are. For Bob, guiding patients to comfort and strength is not strictly religious.

During COVID, listening became more of a communal embrace. Family and friends were not allowed to visit. Bob’s ipad was the lifeline for the family. Even if a patient couldn’t respond, the family could express love. The connections were limited to 20 minutes. Conversations might or or might not go very deep.

While the nurses and doctors were doing the truly heroic work, Bob recounts, his encounters were ones of loss. The infection-control protocols were so strict, they naturally limited the connection he strived to make. Everyone was gowned up, in N95 respirator masks, plastic gowns and gloves.

He was on call, often getting summoned overnight by pager to help both patient and family connect with their own faith when dying patients were failing.

He recalls that at certain points, 2/3 of the hospital patients had COVID. The hospital experienced short breathers of fewer COVID cases, until a new strain would spike the numbers again.

According to Evanston’s COVID-19 database, the peak periods were Jan. and Sept. 2022, two years into the pandemic. More than 200 new cases a day. The hospital served north side Chicago neighborhoods, as well as Evanston.

The COVID deaths in the hospital was nothing short of “overwhelming,” Bob recalls. The hospital’s morgue was at capacity. Refrigerator trucks were brought in.

Lois, a writer, researcher and Bob’s wife, maintained a detailed journal about COVID from Sat., March 21, 2020 through May 2023.

Coincidentally, she and Bob were vacationing in Door County, WI in late Feb. 2020 when she read some random news stories about the beginnings of an epidemic in China and a case in Washington state, and thought “things don’t stay put usually.” So after they returned home, she went to the Evanston library and took out a stack of books, “in case we get shut down,” including those on the 1918 influenza epidemic. The next day, “everything in Evanston shut down.”

What fascinated her about the 1918 epidemic is it “got forgotten.” The world was at war and people didn’t talk about the epidemic. Collective global amnesia set in.

Her first entry in the journal on March 21, 2020 reads: “First day of spring, 9^th day of national emergency for corona virus pandemic.”

She journaled when then-President Trump declared a national emergency and when Evanston’s mayor did the equivalent for Evanston, when the Chicago archdiocese closed all churches and schools, when restaurants and bars closed, when Illinois held its political primaries and Ohio didn’t, when Bob began to do his on-call shifts from home instead of at the hospital, and how hospitals were already running low on PPEs (personal protective equipment).

She kept regular count of COVID cases and deaths in familiar locations, using a website out of France.

She worried about people making ends meet, how housekeepers were getting by without income, and mused about how people who lived alone were coping. She recorded how her block went outside at 6 pm to have 6-foot distance chats. She put a candle in the front window. She kept a video from her son who lived in NYC and went outside to bang pots, pans, and cowbells every night at 7 pm to support the workers. She wrote about missing conversations with her dad who was a doctor and had died 38 years earlier. She commemorated Earth Day 2020 with an entry about how animals and the planet were beginning to heal because humans were in hiding. She felt a surreal juxtaposition between planting in the garden and word from Bob that the hospital was at capacity.

As the summer brought signs of relief, she wrote that she still was uncomfortable eating in restaurants or going places indoors even with a mask.

She philosophized: “We’re living in a historic time in so many ways. The pandemic has ripped off the veneer and now we see more clearly the sins and errors of America and of our own. It’s easier now to ask ourselves what really matters, how do we want to live, what is a fair and just society. It’s what I used to call the silver lining of a cancer diagnosis. Now that you can see clearly, what will you do?”

In Feb. 2021, she recorded the 18 inches of snow Chicago and Evanston got.

COVID cases were declining. A close friend with whom she sang in her church choir had visited friends over Christmas and died of COVID after being hospitalized for a month. He said, “We rolled the dice and lost. You cannot let your guard down.”

She re-read the first few days of her diary and added this reminiscence about returning from Door County one year before. “We were so innocent.”

A year later, in Jan. 2022, she noted how her entries had waned. “I’ve just been feeling such fatigue about COVID that I haven’t had the heart for it.”

That’s when COVID dealt Bob, Lois and their family a fatal blow. Their son-in-law Darryl, who suffered from a complicated auto immune condition, died of COVID within days of exposure. The hospital, across town in Chicago, put aside its restrictions and let in their daughter to say their goodbyes. “It is an evil disease,” Lois wrote.

She tracked the disease through May 2023: “COVID is over but not exactly. The US national emergency is over as of today. The WHO declared the world health emergency over on May 5.

“Three years of illness, death, overworked medical staffs, separation, masks, sanitizers, quarantines, vaccine boosters, proof of vaccination cards, flight restrictions, travel restrictions, empty restaurants, stores out of everything from toilet paper to infant formula, empty storefronts, grieving families, sirens along Amsterdam Avenue in New York, overfilled morgues, hospitals stretched beyond capacity, families saying goodbye to loved ones on ipads, face time, choirs learning that singing can be deadly, ” she catalogued.

Lois wrote that we’d all learned a lot. “Most of all, we’ve learned the great cost of separation. We need it to learn, to grieve, to love.”

My hope is that we will not just walk away from this time, try to forget, go back to normal. I hope we will remind ourselves of what was lost and what was gained.”

One more thing: “Keeping this journal…has been one way for me to keep from going insane during the epidemic.

“Yesterday, the end of the emergency was warm and sunny, a day that made you glad to be alive.”

#####

You don’t have to be a “Yooper” to be welcome in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP). It helps if you can withstand the cold and go for long stretches without seeing people.

For Yoopers, social distancing ran in the extended families long before COVID worked its way north.

Like most people, Kappy Laing had not heard of COVID in Jan. 2020, that is, until she and her partner were returning to the states and the Upper Peninsula from a Brandi Carlile Girls Just Wanna Weekend in Riviera Maya, Mexico.

To their surprise, customs officials at the Mexican border asked them if they were coming from China. China? If they were, they were advised, they’d be diverted to L.A. to be quarantined.

They weren’t so they weren’t. When they got back to the UP, they began to read all about it. The first recollection she has of COVID in their lives were the spacing circles at the grocery store as a way to ensure social distancing. She and her friends began moving their cocktail hours from inside to outdoor bonfires in driveways. Two of Kappy’s musical friends celebrated her birthday by serenading her from outside her home to a version of the Beatles’ “You Say It’s Your Birthday.”

The community applied social distance to their cross-country skiing. “We’re very obedient people, up here,” she says, proudly.

Otherwise, it was winter, and winters in the UP have a certain hibernating character.

When vaccines became available, it was “a big deal” in the UP, Kappy recalls, but vaccines weren’t available in their town. An enterprising neighbor organized a convoy of about a dozen cars. The convoy set out south for about 45 minutes to Manistique, on the north shore of Lake Michigan, where each car lined up under a tent, and each person disrobed enough in the cold to get a jab. They then drove back.

The ritual came in handy when Kappy went to a concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music. in Chicago where she’d lived for years. She could get into the concert only after showing her COVID immunization card.

The cards were common by then, but to them, the process was shockingly alien. The UP’s natural isolation kept COVID and many of its accoutrements and necessities out for a time.

“People would come back here from funerals, say, or they’re with their families downstate, and they’d come back with COVID,” Kappy recounts. “Then all of a sudden, everybody got it.”

She was with her mom in Florida and by the time she got back, her partner had COVID, which she’d contracted from a book club gathering and which she’s still suffering from.

On her way back from Florida, Kappy stopped in Chicago again, this time to have dinner with friends. She wondered aloud if she should quarantine there, and they quickly shooed her away. “Go back, go back.”

With each visit to Chicago, she was a hit with another COVID reality check. Not being allowed to get in an elevator with other people. “How weird is that?”

As in Chicago, everyone in the UP had a mask. At the beginning they were all homemade. Fabric swatches, she recalls, “that would show up on people’s faces.” The handiwork of a quilting culture.

She hasn’t kept COVID memorabilia. “We all got rid of stuff afterwards. It wasn’t something we remember fondly.”

Kappy’s partner’s bouts with COVID have hung on and continue to plague their lives. She’s had COVID twice that presented initially as an all-body rash that turned into a breathing problem, brain fog and incessant sleeping. She ‘d wake up, have a cup of coffee and fall asleep in the chair, reading.

With each symptom came a different specialist, and for each, long distance travels. There are no rheumatologists there to deal with the rash. Also no pulmonologists.

None of the doctors are willing to make a pronouncement that she has long COVID because the condition “is not one illness.” According to the CDC website: “There is no approved laboratory test that can determine if your symptoms or conditions are due to Long COVID.”

She’s now in a federally funded longitudinal study that they’re afraid will be discontinued because of the federal DOGE-like cutbacks. DOGE (Federal Department of Government Efficiency) itself has been discontinued, with no plans to do a closing DOGE report, according to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

Beyond Kappy’s partner’s debilitating long COVID, much of COVID is a blur. She muses, “That happened, that really happened?”

Kappy can think of only two people in her entire UP circle who haven’t had COVID, though none have died. Her observation is those with serious COVID did not seek out hospitalization. They stayed home and suffered it, “and some people suffered miserably. Yoopers are very stoical people,” she adds, admiringly.

She and he partner are planning to return to Chicago shortly to live. The final straw for them was a 60-minute ambulance drive to the nearest hospital that could treat her.

They’ll take with them fond memories of the UP, COVID notwithstanding.

They have plenty of friends to reconnect with back in Chicago, including one who named her dog Fauci.

#####

Looking back, Celestine Bloomfield finds it hard to reconcile that of the legions of people in her storytelling classes, no one has told or worked on any COVID-related stories.

Maybe it’s collective amnesia, she surmises.

No COVID stories during the first year of the epidemic when she did a recorded presentation of “Scary Stories” in Oct. 2020 at the Tibbs Drive-In Theater.

No COVID stories from the monthly Story Slams she hosts in different locations around Indianapolis or from the workshops she conducts to teach people how to tell stories and become professional storytellers.

None at the parks, day camps, YMCAs, churches, and community centers, where she shares multicultural folktales.

She doesn’t know if any will surface in the work she’s currently doing with neighbors who use artifacts to amplify stories at the Polklore Micro-Museum.

Celestine has made stories her forte “since King Kong was a baby monkey,” as she puts it on her bio page on Storytelling Arts of Indiana: Transforming everyday life.

It’s not as if COVID has eluded her. The retired grade school educator and library media specialist has had COVID twice. A good friend has long COVID and can’t smell. Two coaches at her high school died of COVID. So too has a friend who was out delivering food to widows on Thanksgiving.

Early on in the epidemic, “it was like if you went to the hospital with COVID, you were gone.”

She recounts the horror story of a nursing home chain, which experienced 30 COVID deaths at its facility in Anderson, 40 miles northeast of Indianapolis.

Celestine retired from the school system in 2012 when she was confined to a wheelchair.

COVID has traumatized her. She still tries to avoid the news. The quiet of home during COVID felt precious to her, though she recalls the time she stayed home suffering from COVID as “the worst thing in the world” because her concern with not transmitting it to anyone kept her from connecting with people.

As a self-described “rule follower,” Celestine collected covid tests and gave them to friends and relatives. She kept all kinds of masks. Some she decorated.

“There are only a few things you can control and one is peace and tranquility in your own house.”

One positive memory of COVID is that she loved how the world settled down; loved the stillness crawling through streets; how the air seemed to clear.

As Thanksgiving approached in 2020, a good friend, CW, visited her at home, delivering food. They’d met doing plays in a repertory company. He sang at Celestine’s mom’s funeral. She recalls him as a meticulous, flashy dresser, a model, he was so good-looking. He often outfitted himself in shoes, sox and hat to match.

When he came to her door with the Thanksgiving delivery, he must have lacked a certain flair. She told him to go to the emergency room. He did. In the short time he was hospitalized, the ventilator didn’t seem to work for him. He struggled to breathe.

He died of COVID within two weeks. Dec. 14, 2020. She remembers the date. His son in law called to tell her he’d passed. She had to attend the funeral over Zoom.

His obituary reads: ‘Charlie was gifted and talented by God. He loved to sing for the Lord, decorate, travel, perform in theatric plays, model (fashion tours), help people and loved PEACE, not confusion.”

For Celestine, COVID has not passed. Neither has the trauma. She keeps a huge bottle of hand sanitizer in her home and Lysol wipes in her car. She carries with her two cards detailing her vaccine regimen.

At her 70^th birthday bash, she didn’t invite COVID-deniers and anti-vaxxers.

It fascinates her whose work was considered “essential” and stayed open. The car washes were essential.

She used to cook all the time. Not anymore. Not since she burned the same piece of meat twice.

She continues to channel the trauma she feels into her commitment to keep stories alive, as in this video appeal.

#####

Students on the Niles West High School 2021 yearbook staff put it this way as they came to terms with a once in a lifetime school reimagining.

The earth moved under their feet, the sky tumbled down, hearts started to tremble, as students were about to be on spring break in spring of 2020. Schools and universities throughout the country were in similar situations.

As English teacher Sharon Swanson recalls, she was into her 27^th year as yearbook adviser and anticipating, as were the students, that they would return to school after break.

They didn’t and it would be another 1-1/2 yrs before they did fully in person. Instead they turned to Zoom and interacted mostly from there as they carved alternative universes out of classes, sports, dances, clubs, and yearbook publishing.

In partnership with Jostens, a Minneapolis-based company, the yearbook maintained the usual rubrics – seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen, student life, faculty, academics, activities, clubs, sports.

It also riffed off Zoom and COVID as the overarching themes. A mix of photos with and without masks conveyed the before and after March 2020. The yearbook celebrated the creativity of mask designing.

Zoom screen grabs directed readers from page to page.

For sports, it was like each sport had an asterisk to differentiate 2020-21 from all other seasons. Team strategy meetings could still be done by zoom. Not so easy with games and competitions. Masks were incorporated in the equipment. Team travel was limited. How to play football with no physical contact? Gymnasts divined ways to practice at home. The invocation to “dance like nobody’s watching” was put to the test. Competitions were via camera, no audiences. Livestream feeds of swimmers in their home pools determined the winners. Tennis competitors took hand sanitizer breaks every 20 minutes. The track and field season was reduced from six months to two.

In its year-end headline recap, the yearbook reminded students of the shared trauma of “No Hugging Grandma” and provided a handy COVID vocabulary list:

Sharon and the yearbook staff chronicled the year’s activities without meeting once in person.

If COVID tore the school experiences apart, it also held them together. As the ongoing spring semester eased into summer vacation, the staff envisioned a design – “Coronacation”- that captured the essence of Zoom learning.

The yearbook relayed how students began adapting through creativity.

Before students fanned out for the summer, on May 25, George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. Students at Niles West in northwest suburban Skokie outside Chicago, showed support for Black Lives Matter, according to the yearbook.

The school enrollment of about 2,500 is one-third White, one-third Asian, 17% Hispanic and 7% Black.

COVID didn’t keep students from attending protests and spreading awareness. It did, however, result in prom being cancelled, according to the yearbook, and with students and families finding innovative ways to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people by blasting music in driveways and dancing on lawns.

Once school reconvened in the fall, the school entered its hybrid learning period, starting out fully remote.

Parents decided if their kids would go to school.

“Students’ bedrooms, living rooms, kitchen and even Starbucks turned into their classrooms,” the yearbook noted. It also mentioned a silver lining. Students were able to take power naps during the 10-minute breaks between classes.

As an English teacher, Sharon recalls getting used to it, but found it an “extremely difficult adjustment.” She required all her students to be on camera. Not all teachers did.

Neither Sharon nor her students will forget how she adapted a perennial assignment she gave her sophomore English class. Typically she invited Chicago Tribune reporter Ted Gregory into class to discuss the Trib’s series, Teens at the wheel, dating back to 2009, and distributed stories of teens who’d died in auto accidents. She assigned the students a young victim whose autobiography they’d write. To commemorate the assignment, she’d give students a toy car on their 16th birthday. During COVID with students attending remotely, on their birthday, “I’d drop off a toy car at their house.”

More often, the COVID school years were lessons in transcending tedium. She taught from a table in her home. In between classes, she’d vacuum or putter. She continued her relationships with teaching colleagues. They’d meet periodically in teachers’ garages and devised ways to eat lunch in 10 degree weather with winter coats on.

#####

Adriana Mateus had a reputation in her family for being such a pathetic cook that she could burn water. No longer.

She’s submitting a 150-page memoir for publication. Thanks in part to the vagaries of COVID, “One Meal at a Time: Nourishment and Wholeness” is a series of gifts initially bestowed to help her nephews and nieces keep their cultural traditions alive.

The gifts include more than 30 bilingual recipes, all marinated in her family’s “courage in the time of COVID,” are steeped in unconditional love, time, suffering, friendship, kindness, hope, words, solitude, memories, healing, gratitude, forgiveness, and acceptance; 14 chapters now packaged to “help others who may have lost their sense of self find it again.”

Adriana and her husband Dan live in Fitchburg, outside Madison, WI. Adrián, her nephew who was named after her, lived with them through much of COVID, and does again until he starts Marquette University in the fall.

In May 2020, shortly after COVID punctured life, Adrián wrote a school essay – “Living History.” In it, he reflected on his positive take on the COVID phenomenon. He liked staying home from school, which came with learning how to cook, laughing with his aunt, more time with family sometimes only via Zoom, and playing guitar.

Adrián was not oblivious to the struggles of others; those who might not have enough money or who might lose their homes. If restaurants shut down, how do farmers who grew food for them get money?

He began noticing things; the smell of food wafting, birds outside the window. He felt like the mama robin sitting in her nest, all day and night as the male robin went out and fetched food. “I can get through this,” he wrote.

One of his creations was pesto. Fresh basil, garlic, parmesan, olive oil, pine nuts. Sublime aroma and taste. Then there were the cookies. His came out hard and stale, resembling a hockey puck, according to his grandpa.

Adriana was born in Bogotá, Colombia. When she moved with her mom, four sisters and grandmother to Wisconsin in 1986, the 11-year old spoke no English. As Adriana recalled in a Father’s Day reflection – “How I discovered my American dad” that was published in 2024 on Madison.com – her dad was most proud of her when she won the school’s spelling bee less than a year after arriving in Madison.

She referred to the family move from what was then a violent Colombia as liberation. Among the discoveries in Wisconsin was food. Sloppy Joes, lightly spiced, were a staple.

Food seemed to have almost mystical healing properties for Adriana. She didn’t fully realize it until the COVID pandemic changed everything. As a new year’s resolution going into 2021, she started collecting recipes. She began to notice that she resorted to food for respite. Food seemed to heal people.

As a professional writer, Adriana embellished the recipes with essays, written in both Spanish and English so she could give them to her siblings, nephews and nieces.

It took on the form and purpose of “prescriptive nonfiction.” She envisioned a book propelled by a force: Thou shalt all cook.

A chapter on cooking as healing has stuck with her. She recalled that when she was about 30 years old and going through a touch stretch, she didn’t cook much. At about that time, a one-year-old Adrián was with her. His crying helped revive her from depression. She had to get up. She needed him as much he needed her.

She quit her job in corporate communications and public affairs to challenge herself to help people heal and to take on the vestiges of chronic pain. Possibly through food writing, though the first challenge was her confidence. Who was she to write a memoir? Instead of being overcome with doubts about writing, she took to cooking. Her large and abiding extended family had to eat, right?

COVID had not yet surfaced. When it did a few months later, it hit mercilessly. Friends died, not of COVID, but early during COVID. In Dec. 2020, a cousin, Inesita, died alone in a Colombian hospital, in Fusa (or Fusagasugá), often called the Garden City of Colombia, about 50 miles south of Bogotá, as so many others did around the world. Relatives had to wait to hold a restricted mass.

Adriana and her family attended virtually from Wisconsin. Her closest childhood cousin, Carime, had lived with her aunt until the day she took her to the hospital with what they thought were stomach symptoms or a cold. “It was these heartbreaks that shattered the souls of so many people,” she told Adriana over the phone.

Adriana was taking a philosophy class via Zoom and sought ways to comfort her family in Colombia. The teacher suggested that the students should write a story about courage in the time of COVID. It made Adriana think about the Gabriel García Márquez novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.

She consulted a dictionary and found inspiration in the very definition of courage. She took it as an invocation: The quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear.

It fit snugly into the cooking protocols she’d turned to. She also turned to Adrián who was once again living with her, this time as refuge from COVID.

They experimented together with the right combination of ingredients for pandebonos, a staple of Colombian baking that resembles something between bread and pastry. Dough is rolled into donut-shaped pieces. Then wait for them to emerge from the oven as fully formed golden-baked rolls.

She consulted Why Food Matters by food historian Paul Freedman who added more ingredients of inspiration with a reminder that “exile, immigration, and pandemics reinforce the symbolic significance of food.” He added, “Food has meaning beyond its routine aspect and is important in forming memories and constituting a sense of who we are… Far from fading away, enjoyment endures in our minds, as entrancing and comforting recollections.”

Adrián often played reporter to Adriana’s chef’s kitchen experiments.

As she was making a frittata, Adrián asked: “Now tell me, what do you want to say to our viewers?”

Adrián encouraged his godmother when she failed to keep all the eggs in the pan while she flipped it: “Come on, Tía, you can do it!" But part of the uncooked eggs were already splattered all over the stove. She tried again. Still not appetizing to eat, but ripe for a recipe in the evolving cookbook.

Adriana and Adrián cooked so much during COVID that they referred to their experiments as marathons of meditation or prayer, and the book as a lot about the faith. Did the cooking heal her or did faith?

Have faith. Turn to any page. For instance. Chapter 5 on Friendship. You’ll find changua. For Adriana, this simple breakfast soup from the Andean region of Colombia is a comforting bowl filled with memories of her childhood—a little bit of her grandmother, a little bit of warmth, and a whole lot of home.

“I sit down and take a spoonful of changua,” she wrote, “realizing that this is all I need right now. For at least a little while, the warm sips help me escape the confines of my bedroom and my racing thoughts, allowing me to gradually connect with those around me.”

Have faith, stir, find friendship.

The New York Times savors the ingredients.

Adriana recognizes that she can overdo cooking and that it can be stressful…and time consuming.

She is still learning to slow down. Then again, that’s another reason for cooking, as are these, compliments of the chefs:

#####

A few months into the COVID epidemic, Leezia Dhalla received her green card (Permanent Resident Card). Her employer at the time, FWD.us, a criminal justice and immigration policy organization headquartered in Washington, DC, sponsored her.

For most green card holders, it means they can live and work permanently in the U.S. For Leezia, it signaled something more immediately life changing. She’d already been living in the U.S. for 30 years and she’d been able to work legally ever since she was granted DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) protection from deportation in 2012 coincidentally on the day she graduated from college.

With green card in hand, Leezia began catching up on the international travel that had eluded her. This, as COVID was relegating people to stay put. “Sheltering in place” was a term that was insinuating itself into our lexicon. Tourism waned. International travel plunged by 72% in 2020.

Leezia’s first stop was Mexico. In Cozumel, in early Jan. 2021, cruise ships were not moving. She went scuba diving. She tipped the taxi driver a nominal amount. He told her how his business had bottomed out. He often waited two hours for a ride. With feeling, he blessed her and wished her a good life.

She recalls feeling pangs of privileged guilt. As a child of immigrants, she was doing something frivolous. She thinks of the US as, in many ways, the greatest country on earth and she could now consider traveling the world, feeling her American oats and spreading American good will.

The interaction with the cab driver reminded her of her parents, who are immigrants who worked in a convenience store and live in San Antonio, where she grew up.

As COVID restrictions began to lift in 2021, Leezia took off for Europe. She began to notice that countries other than the US had much to offer; for instance, their train systems, the food people consumed, some advanced technologies.

In Romania, in Dec. 2021, she stopped at Zara to shop and a security guard was scanning a QR code to verify shoppers’ COVID vaccinations, something that had not yet become normalized in the US. She pulled out her paper vaccination record and displayed it. (She still has it at home.) The encounter opened her eyes. The world was so different from what she was led to believe. She thinks of it as “developing a curiosity.”

In Denmark, she needed a COVID test to return to the US. Dozens of trailers were in place in parking lots to do tests. She got her results in 10 minutes. When she got back to the US, it took days to get appointments. Results were emailed back days later.

Leezia is considered exotic back in the US. She was born in Edmonton, Canada, and grew up in San Antonio, TX. She’s ethnically Indian and speaks Kachi, an Indian dialect from an area around Gujarat, a place she barely knows.

As she traveled beyond the US, she reveled in what she calls a “communal spirit.” The spirit spilled over into how people approached the pandemic, with its lingering inconveniences.

In Mexico, there wasn’t much pushback about wearing masks. People were more concerned about access to vaccines and health care.

When COVID surfaced in March 2020, Leezia’s employer, FWD.us seemed ahead of the curve in navigating the outbreak. Working for a social justice organization in Washington, DC, Leezia and her co-workers respected government institutions, hospitals and international cooperation. They took COVID seriously. By the middle of March, her office had closed, and didn’t re-open physically for another 2-1/2 years.

When she spoke with her parents by phone in San Antonio, they weren’t paying much attention to COVID. They were going out to lunch with friends, continuing to work in their family convenience store. Normal lives. Business as usual.

In April 2020, Leezia mailed a box of gloves and face masks to her folks. They seldom used them. Few people in San Antonio did. It was her parents’ survival instinct to blend in.

She felt she was consuming different news, living on two different planets from her parents. “It was almost as if the news about the pandemic had not traveled down yet from DC.” Perplexing, she recounts.

She thinks of COVID as having been a defining point. It changed what her family structure looked like. It also accentuated privilege. She had a job, a salary, was able to work remotely, even got a stipend to buy furniture to make working from home more comfortable. Yet, many other friends no longer had jobs.

Six years earlier, in 2014, Leezia did a live TEDxSanAntonio talk - Hiding in plain sight -- my life as an undocumented American

In it, she described her life as a “journey of transformation,” moving with her family to the US when she was six, learning the Star-Spangled Banner in place of Oh Canada.

A few days before her 21^st birthday, she was returning home from a vacation away with friends, and as she was pushing her suitcase into her bedroom, she heard her dad’s voice from behind. All he said were four words:

“You don’t have papers.” In his hands was an official notice to appear in immigration court, informing her for the first time that she’d overstayed her visa and had to appear before a judge who could bar her from re-entering the US for ten years.

The journey of transformation she depicted in her talk in 2014 had not yet taken her to COVID.

Still her description of “what it’s like to be undocumented in America” could easily be used to refer to our collective experiences of COVID.

She and her parents filed papers, played by the rules, but things went wrong. Years later, “we have nothing to show for it.”

For undocumented people in the US, living “a life of invisibility,” taunted by uncertainty, is hard, she told the audience, and asked them: “How can you really plan for a life when that life can come crashing down at any moment?”

Leezia’s grandma passed away in Canada during COVID, in April 2021. She was in her 90s. Leezia watched the funeral on a laptop. She thought: This is how undocumented people live all the time, often not having an opportunity to be at the bedside of dying family members or to attend funerals. Ironically, the virtual attendance that COVID ushered in was game-changing for her family. It allowed them to participate in funeral services for the first time, as U.S. citizens around her were—possibly for the first time—feeling the cruelty of family separation.

“We try to stay positive. But it’s hard to keep your head down and your chin up at the same time,” she explained.

That was COVID’s defining point too.

“For many people,” Leezia observes, “there’s a particular before and after to COVID.”

For her, COVID taught her to slow down and reinforced a realization that there’s a collective trauma that hasn’t been addressed or discussed. Yet, people are expected to carry on as usual.

#####

[See update below on the Hantavirus]

“People pick and choose. There are people now who watched the Artemis II takeoff and splashdown with great admiration at what science has been able to accomplish, but they’ll turn around in the same breath and say the whole COVID vaccine is killing people.” —Jerry Collins

When Jerry Collins entered the emergency room at Denver General (now Denver Health) in his surgical scrubs, he wore no mask. Though the patients he was seeing had a 100% mortality rate at the time, the chief resident felt no risk.

“Universal (infection control) precautions” were in place that required human blood and body fluids to be treated. He was double gloved.

He had recently returned from a residency in Africa, as understanding of the epidemic was developing. Though he didn’t feel at risk, others in the medical community did. He felt safe because he wasn’t practicing gay sex, but that perspective changed when he realized through occupational exposure that needle pricks could circulate the contagion.

The epidemic was not COVID, but AIDS, and the year was 1983. He recalls that the general public attitude was that AIDS was due to moral failure affecting only gays. As a doctor, he understood it was a health care issue. Moral judgments were wrong and irrelevant. Still, “HIV started out more as a mystery,” Jerry observes.

He recounts that during one of his early 120-hour workweeks, he attended to a near-terminal AIDS patient who needed a chest tube to drain fluid around his lungs for comfort. None of the junior residents would do the routine bedside procedure because they were afraid of exposure, of being in the room or having blood spill on them. Jerry performed the procedure himself. The patient survived the procedure but not AIDS.

Looking at AIDS and COVID side by side can be instructive. Both are caused by RNA viruses, originating from animals. AIDS preceded COVID by nearly 40 years. The span of two generations alone should allow for best practices to be tested and perfected. It can also engender complacency. The intervening years saw a catalog of epidemics and health outbreaks in the U.S and worldwide, including hepatitis, swine flu (H1N1), Zika virus, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), Ebola, E. coli, salmonella, monkeypox (now known as mpox), and opioid and other drug overdose epidemics.

More than 700,000 people in the U.S. have died from AIDS-related causes since the first cases were reported in the early ‘80s. While annual deaths peaked in the mid-1990s and have declined significantly due to antiretroviral therapy (ART), by the time COVID hit the U.S., nearly 5,000 people are still dying with HIV, the underlying cause of death annually, according to KFF.

Over the continuing duration of AIDS, that’s about half the 1.2 million deaths that have been attributed to COVID in the U.S.

For Jerry, when COVID hit in early 2020, the passage of time had turned a young, overworked, committed resident into a 68-year-old approaching retirement; more vulnerable, but with wisdom from aging and with an awareness of his own mortality.

As he retired, about 2-1/2 years into COVID, he told the Loveland Reporter-Herald that general surgery was like love at first sight. “I absolutely love the immediacy of it. The driving force for me was the ability to use both my brain and my hands to help affect someone’s life.”

During the COVID years of the early 2020s, reminders of the disease were everywhere. It was a constant topic of conversation. Masks were integral to daily attire. Families, schools, workplaces, and institutions were affected across the board.

During more than a decade of AIDS, the stark impact tended to be community specific. It was not ubiquitous.

As Jerry thinks back to the bleak stretches of AIDS, he recalls anger and frustration over the disease being ignored.

With COVID, though it endured early periods of being minimized in some quarters, as the disease spread, societal clashes grew deep and strident. They boiled over as pushback relating to treatments, vaccines, and community and school buy-ins. Fueled by skepticism and misinformation, the word “science” became a shibboleth, an article of faith.

The COVID pandemic spread so quickly and extensively, Jerry recalls, that his hospital in Loveland transferred most of the COVID-infected patients to a sister hospital in Greeley 20 miles away. Because of his age, he was excluded from the teams. He felt most for the ICU nurses and medical staff.

“I can’t imagine the PTSD for the ICU nurses who had to watch people die,” he told the Loveland Reporter-Herald. They had to hold up a phone for family members who couldn’t visit the patients.

Healthcare providers were lost not just to death, he elaborates, but to dealing with patients who denied COVID even while dying from it.

“People pick and choose,” he reflects. “There are people now who watched the Artemis II takeoff and splashdown with great admiration at what science has been able to accomplish, but they’ll turn around in the same breath and say the whole COVID vaccine is killing people.”

He continues to be dumfounded at the lost opportunities in the early stages of COVID. He recalls reading Spillover, a book that was published in 2012 by science writer David Quammen, eight years before COVID. In it, Quammen tracked the animal origins of emerging human diseases and pondered, What might the next big one be?

The vagaries of COVID brought out the uncanny ineptitude of the early Trump administration that defunded a program that had positioned scientists in Wuhan, the China city where COVID originated.

On April 23, 2020, only a few months into the COVID epidemic, then-President Trump encouraged health officials to study the injection of bleach into the human body as a means of fighting COVID.

Paradoxically, Jerry adds, the Trump administration also double downed on Operation Warp Speed, the public–private partnership officially announced by Trump on May 15, 2020 that facilitated and accelerated the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.

Jerry worries that the lessons of AIDS and COVID are highlighting dangerous preparedness gaps, and that possible future pandemics, like bird flu, will find us similarly off guard.

Trust in the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has been compromised, according to a KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust.

Its site on bird flu plays down any serious risks, summarizing:

· A(H5) bird flu is widespread in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows with sporadic human cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers.

· While the current public health risk is low, CDC is watching the situation carefully and working with states to monitor people with animal exposures.

· CDC is using its flu surveillance systems to monitor for A(H5) bird flu activity in people.

Jerry appreciates the concerns, pointing to recent reports that the CDC canceled publication of a scientific report showing the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. Even more recent accounts have implicated the F.D.A. (Food and Drug Administration) in blocking publication of research finding that COVID and shingles vaccines are safe.

Jerry sees parallels beyond AIDS and COVID, those going forward like bird flu and others resonating deep from our past.

He wonders if lessons from post-polio syndrome, for instance, in which people who had polio as children seemed to recover but are now experiencing resurgent symptoms in older age, might be relevant to long term COVID.

[A few days after the interview for this story, word emerged about a Hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise liner. Here’s an update on that outbreak - Hantavirus countdown: U.S. cruise passengers settle in for 42 days of waiting]

######

“I must be thankful for all of the branches that cover [my children], and that they aren’t only held up by me.” --Sharna Marcus

For someone like Sharna Marcus who cherishes community, the isolation of COVID pulled a protective blanket out from over her family.

A few years before COVID washed over the planet, Sharna and her husband moved their family to Israel. She’d accepted a high school teaching job at the Walworth Barbour American International School in Even Yehuda near Tel Aviv.

The first case of COVID in Israel was confirmed on Feb. 21, 2020, when a woman tested positive after returning from the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantine. On March 11, Israel began enforcing social distancing and other rules to limit the spread of the virus. Gatherings were first restricted to 100 people, then lowered to 10 people. On March 19, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a national state of emergency. People were not allowed to leave their homes unless absolutely necessary.

Sharna and her family lived in an apartment in Netanya, a city of more than 200,000 along the Mediterranean Sea about 20 miles north of Tel Aviv. Though she doesn’t think of the apartment as small, the quarantine felt suffocating.

Sharna agreed to get a dog for their two children, Maya, then 7, and Benjamin, then 5. They’d wanted a dog for two years. She hadn’t, but as the family and the rest of Israel needed to adapt to social isolation, she acquiesced. Even though the kids were prone to viral induced asthma, the tradeoff to address the kids’ newfound uncertainties and loneliness seemed worth it. At first, the remedy backfired. Benjamin’s concerns became re-directed at Yoshi, the dog.

They all adapted.

As the pandemic matured into April, Sharna blogged about the situation. In the blog - A Hut is Still a Home – Sharna recalled her childhood, “living on the same block as my aunt, uncle, cousins and grandparents.” In her hometown in Indiana, she could call dozens of people who would do anything for her “in the blink of an eye.”

In social isolation, to the extent that they had a village, it felt like a hut (a sukkah). Still, it was a village, embracing the many people who were involved in her kids’ lives, without whom their universe would be desolate, she wrote.

She realized then, only a month into the pandemic, which they called Corona, that if it lasted much longer, she, the mom, would not be enough. No parents would. Kids are not meant to be raised in isolation, Sharna wrote.

That night at bedtime, Maya lamented that she missed school, the same school where Sharna taught, where Maya thought Sharna worked too hard. Sharna felt the same, but she also felt she couldn’t let her students down. She couldn’t pull back. How to balance both?

It doesn’t help, she thought, to compare her childhood with the isolation-infested childhood of Corona. She felt grateful that her kids were rooted in a place where plenty of branches covered them.

One day, she and the kids went for a distancing walk; only them on the streets. Sharna interviewed Maya on video.

“When we’re in the Corona,” Maya observed, I feel like less people are going around and more are lonely. Less learning and actually a little more time with the family. That’s a little good.” Her 5-year-old brother popped his head into the shot and added,”bladdleladdleladdle.”

“What’s Corona?” Sharna asked. “It’s a little purple thing. It’s a germ. It’s a really bad germ. If you’re a very old person, you can die from it, but if you’re young, like my age, 7, you can get it, but not die from it.” She suggested washing your hands to keep from getting it” after you go to places, before you eat and maybe before you go somewhere.” She added that people should be more happy to spend time with the family. She told the camera that her brother didn’t want to talk about it. Maya missed plenty of people and she rattled off one name after another in the family. “Everybody. It’s hard,” and she advised, “you just have to stick with it and maybe it will pass.”

It took a long while to pass. For some, it will never pass. It was not until May 2023 that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an end to the public health emergency of international concern.

In Israel, the virus and its aftermath of international travel restrictions ran with only a few months of interruption into the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas-led militants. The surprise terror attack from Gaza into southern Israel, resulted in more than 1,200 deaths—mostly civilians—and the abduction of 251 hostages. That was followed immediately by Israeli retaliations into Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon that have resulted in fatalities and casualties that are orders of magnitude higher. Two of Sharna’s former students were killed in the war, and she was with a colleague when the colleague received news that her son had been stabbed to death by a Jordanian truck driver who was bringing in humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Forbes reported in Jan. 2026 that tourism in Israel only began to recover in 2025, with 1.3 million visitors. During those six years, much of the Israeli tourism industry was kept afloat by domestic tourism, with over 13 million overnight stays by Israelis in hotels across the country.

That has taken a direct toll on Sharna’s family. Her husband, a born-Israeli, who worked as an educational tour guide has averaged only two groups a year since COVID. Between 2011-2019, he led about 10 groups - up to 400 young adults per year.

According to data from the WHO and KFF, the leading health policy organization in the U.S., the death toll in Israel from COVID was almost 13,000, with another 6,000 in occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem. In the U.S., 1.2 million deaths have been attributed to COVID, by far the highest mortality in the world, almost double that in Brazil, the next highest.

As of Oct. 2021, one in seven Israelis had been infected by COVID during the course of the pandemic, with the ultra-Orthodox community hit the worst, at about 31%, according to Haaretz, Isarel’s left-leaning and longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel.

Sharna recalls that many of her students went to one another’s homes, even before the vaccines came out in mid-December 2020 (at about the same time as in the US). None of the teachers in her school got covid until the kids returned to school, at which point, she recalls, “almost everyone got it,” though the school used its outdoor campus to hold classes outside.

“Almost any return to normalization brought back COVID,” Sharna recounts. Sharna had COVID twice, both times after taking the vaccine. The first, she recalls as bad; the second less so. That bout came after an overnight with kids, when a woman came in not wearing a mask, she surmises.

In visceral ways, the duration of COVID for Sharna and family felt like 12-13 months, from Passover in April 2020 to Passover 2021. Each year, they counted on visiting Sharna’s family in Indiana three times. During the first year of COVID, they didn’t make it home and her parents didn’t leave their house at all. Once things opened up, they went to the U.S. to be with family.

Sharna’s dad would live another 18 months, working right up to his death from pneumonia. Sharna flew home to be by his side the last week of his life. The dad of one of Sharna’s good friends died of COVID and she never got a chance to say goodbye.

Sharna considers herself blessed, literally. Before her dad lost consciousness, he stated his expectations and wishes for how the family should honor his legacy. “It was very Biblical, like when Jacob blessed his 12 sons before his death,” Sharna recounts.

“Since 2020, life has never really been the same,” she feels, and wonders if the relative ease of her life will ever return.

######

“It’s a preservation gene in all of us to just mute the trauma and the drama that came with it (COVID). Time is lessening and weakening our memories and the sting of it all.” --T. Sean Herbert

On the morning of Jan. 26, 2020, much of the world’s attention began to turn to Calabasas, California, outside Los Angeles where basketball legend Kobe Bryant and eight others en route by helicopter to a girl’s basketball game died in a crash. News crews were summoned to flesh out the tragedy.

CBS News Producer T. Sean Herbert, summoned from an assignment in Puerto Rico, was among them. Because the news crew was back in the L.A. area, it was assigned a few days later to also cover the quarantine of a small group of State Dept. personnel who’d arrived from China at the March Air Reserve Base near the Loma Linda University Medical Center about 80 miles east of L.A. A large tent was set up in the parking lot outside the hospital in case sick COVID patients needed to be segregated from others seeking medical care.

Within CBS News, this was treated as an international story far off the radar screen from the ubiquity of Bryant’s death. The intrigue, allure and perceived public interest in international news in journalism’s 20^th century heyday had long since waned.

By Jan. 26, China had alerted the World Health Organization of 27 cases of “viral pneumonia” in its central city of Wuhan. Cases were confirmed first in Asia, then in Europe. Following an emergency meeting, The WHO reported that the new coronavirus did not yet constitute an international emergency.

It would be another six weeks before Sean and his team would cover anything related to the mysterious virus.

On Feb. 5, about 3,700 passengers were quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess cruise liner. The quarantine lasted nearly a month. More than 700 passengers tested positive and 14 died.

In Feb., the U.S. banned foreign travelers who were recently in China. Some airlines suspended flights to Hong Kong. The stock markets began feeling a dramatic hit.

On March 1, two deaths were reported at a nursing home near Seattle, thought at the time to be the first fatalities in the U.S.

In March, the virus punctured the domestic news space. Broadway shows were being suspended, and scheduled to return April 13.

Sean interviewed a union rep about the impact the virus might have on the theater business. It was the same day, March 11, that CBS staffers were advised that the CBS Broadcast Center in NYC was shutting down. Staffers were directed to work remotely due to COVID concerns.

President Trump declared a national emergency to free up $50 billion in federal aid.

On March 16, Sean shot a photo on his cellphone of an eerily empty Grand Central Station during rush hour.

A few days later, California issued a state-wide “stay at home order” and New York closed non-essential businesses.

Sean mentally bookmarks March 19 as the day COVID became memorable.

He bought gloves, wipes, antiseptics, masks and PPE (personal protective equipment) supplies. He wore a PPE mask when he and his crew got access to Lennox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. For a live shot he did for the morning news, he recalls most the intense vomiting in the streets from patient to patient.

In late March, the first CBS News employee to contract COVID died. Samaritan Purse had set up a field hospital in Central Park in the beginning of April, when Sean and a select group of CBS News staffers were given PPE training, which educated workers on selecting, fitting, using, and maintaining protective gear to minimize hazardous exposures. Employees had to demonstrate understanding before being exposed to others.

After getting a few assignments in high risk COVID environments under his belt, he and and three other CBS News volunteers embedded for seven days and nights from April 16-22, inside the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. The filming, using no correspondents, resulted in a one-hour special that aired on May 15 on CBS.

[View Bravery and Hope: 7 Days on the Front Line (2020) here.]

In recalling how little was known then about the contagiousness of COVID and the precautions being taken throughout society, Sean marvels at the hospital workers who relied on the PPE equipment so they could do their jobs. They escorted the TV crews around the hospital.

Before being allowed on the project, CBS News required its crews to sign a waiver that acknowledged they were volunteering for the assignment and that CBS was cleared of any liability.

At this point and for the rest of 2020, when he would go home, he was not allowed in the house.

During 2020, as most people were hunkering down and trying to adapt to self-isolation, Sean was one of the most traveled employees in the entire company. He and a colleague were often the only two passengers on planes and guests in hotels. They weren’t allowed to have hotel staff clean their rooms.

#####

LINES N’ LYRIX

​Moon edition – Fat Shallot – April 12, 2026 - 24 songs
The Artemis II mission successfully concluded on April 10.
The nine-day mission, the first crewed flight to the moon
in over 50 years, carried four astronauts
and traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history.
The humans were Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover,
Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen (the first Canadian
to travel to the moon)
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The judiciary is once again using its power of the pen to hold accountable the Trump administration and its cabinet-full of cowering order followers.

Over the past two weeks, in two opinions, Trump and his minions have gotten reamed by two federal judges, one appointed by George W. Bush and the other by Bill Clinton.

In one case, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered a halt to the construction of what was to be a $400 million, 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom. In the other, Senior Judge Paul L. Friedman put a stop to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s continued attempts to control the press.

These two rulings are in line with a run of blistering recent federal bench opinions that I highlighted in Judges who don’t hold back: The only vigilant branch weaponizes wit.

Judge Leon’s 35-page opinion opened with: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” [exclamation point his] He concluded that Trump cannot construct major additions without explicit congressional approval. In reaching his conclusion, Judge Leon ridiculed the “aptly described Rube Goldberg contraption” that authorizes Trump to use private donations made to the Secretary of the Interior.

The judge was careful to exempt form his order any “actions strictly necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House and its grounds” and “provide for the personal safety of the President and his staff.”

In the few days since the ruling, Trump’s legal team appealed, arguing that completion of the project as a whole is necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House and its grounds. [See NBC News story: “White House calls new ballroom a national security necessity that’s ‘vital’ to the Trump family’ safety: The administration indicated it will go to the Supreme Court if the federal appeals court doesn’t rule in Trump’s favor.”]

In a 4-page order, an appeals panel put a hold on the Judge Leon’s preliminary injunction, allowing the construction to continue until Judge Leon addresses directly the White House’s claim of a national security concern though his injunction runs only against the “physical development of the proposed ballroom.”

It noted that in the hastily composed planning documents for the ballroom, it was never expected to be completed for almost three years from when ground was broken on Oct. 20, 2025, meaning completion of the ballroom is anticipated to be summer 2028.

Judge Neomi Jehangir Rao, appointed to the bench by Trump after serving in the first Trump administration for two years, added a 12-page dissenting statement. She wrote that the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States lack standing to file the lawsuit. She urged that construction of the ballroom continue.

Judge Leon responded almost immediately, writing again that Congress must approve the project. Referring to Trump’s brazen assertions to the court that were “in direct conflict with [his] prior representations, he added that Trump appeared to be trying to side-step a previous court order by reclassifying the ballroom plans as vital for national security. "National security is not a blank cheque to proceed with otherwise unlawful activity," the judge wrote.

Trump responded in kind, with his own indignant style, calling Leon a "Trump Hating" judge who "has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn't get built." He appealed again.

An appeals court panel gave Trump what he wanted…for now, allowing construction on the White House ballroom to go forward into June, and scheduled arguments for June 5 to reconsider if all construction should be blocked.

Senior Judge Paul L. Friedman took aim at the Pentagon’s reinstatement of the very policy the court had enjoined. “The Department cannot simply reinstate an unlawful policy under the guise of taking ‘new’ action and expect the Court to look the other way…. Nor can the Department take steps to circumvent the Court’s injunction and expect the Court to turn a blind eye. But that is exactly what the defendants have done by closing the Correspondents’ Corridor and imposing an escort requirement.”

Pen in cheek, Judge Friedman wrote: “At bottom, the defendants ask this Court to hold that so long as the Department does not reinstate the exact words of the Challenged Provisions, and so long as it restores The Times’ reporters’ physical credentials, it has done enough. If the Department immediately uses new words to do the same thing? Too bad. The plaintiffs need to start over while the Court stands idly by. If the Department immediately takes steps to undermine the purpose of the reporters’ credentials, namely, entry to the Pentagon? Again, too bad.”

“In short,” the court underscored: “This is nonsense.”

The judge kept going. In reminding us all that “suppression of political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy,” Judge Friedman lectured: “The Court cannot conclude this Opinion without noting once again what this case is really about: the attempt by the Secretary of Defense to dictate the information received by the American people, to control the message so that the public hears and sees only what the Secretary and the Trump Administration want them to hear and see. The Constitution demands better. The American public demands better, too.”

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