March 24, 2025 - Good Morning. It’s Monday, March 24.
Social Distancing - Hand Sanitizer - Zoom Meetings - SuperSpreaders - Elbow Shakes - Quarantine - Face Masks - Work From Home - Supply Chains - Nasal Swabs - Forehead Thermometers - Home Test Kits - Etc - Etc - Etc! Every major event and historical era has its own specific vocabulary. These terms take us back to March of 2020, as we “celebrate” a dubious five-year anniversary. Today we recall the Coronavirus pandemic. Today we remember... when the world changed.
Added to that list of words is a list of numbers. 70 million, the number of worldwide confirmed deaths from Covid. 700 million cases across the globe. 1 million fatalities in the United States - the most of any country. You probably knew someone who was a victim of the virus. I lost three friends. And still today, 400 million people deal with a litany of chronic symptoms, a syndrome called Long Covid.
Five years ago we saw schools shut down, businesses closed, sports leagues suspended, travel halted. Patients in hospitals and nursing homes were shut off from their own families. Churches were part of this “lockdown”, too. Almost all of them cancelled public worship services. Most services returned in the fall, but most churches still haven’t seen a return to pre-pandemic attendance numbers. The “Covid gap” in education continues to negatively affect student test scores. Remote jobs remain the new normal for many adult workers. Things changed in the spring of 2020, and many of those changes are still with us.
There has also been a pandemic of loneliness and isolation. Millions seek connection mainly through social media, but find that all those “Facebook friends” are a poor substitute for real personal contact. During the worst of the pandemic we were denied basic human touch - handshakes, hugs. When we lost that, we came to realize how much we needed it. We remembered how much we need family, friends, people. Much has changed in our world, but some things never change.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
