Letter to the Editor: What Might We Learn from Covid?

~ Submitted by Matthew Derman

First of all, let me say upfront that I am personally against ending any mask mandates. We should, individually and collectively, be doing everything we can to mitigate the risk of anyone suffering death, disability, or serious illness from COVID.  And I will continue to mask publicly for the foreseeable future regardless of whether or not the mandate remains.

But that’s not really what I want to say here. I bring up the mandate because something I keep seeing and hearing when people discuss that topic is this idea of “getting back to normal.” So I’m here to urge everyone, regardless of your feelings on masks, to please understand that nothing—not ending the mandates, not declaring COVID is over when it clearly isn’t, not even the actual end of the pandemic itself—will ever get us “back” to the state we were in before.

We have all lived through 2 years of COVID, and are certainly going to live through more. It’s possible it will never fully go away. But even if it was gone tomorrow, the impact has already been significant. We have lost people. Survivors have had their health ruined, perhaps forever. All of us have given things up, and all of us bear scars.

It’s not that things will be exactly as they are now forever. It’s that, whatever normalcy we ultimately manage to establish in the future, it will be different than what preceded it. We cannot go back. Trying to do so, insisting we must, is an exercise in magical thinking that can only lead to disappointment, if not despair.

Where hope lies is in the idea that we might learn something from all of this. Like that we need each other to survive, to flourish. That communities are interdependent, and that a community is indeed what we should strive to be. That we are all only truly as safe or as free as the most vulnerable among us.

Let us acknowledge what we’ve lost and aim for something new, something better, together. Because there is damage already done by COVID that we’ll need to repair. And there are other large-scale dangers like it looking ahead. We cannot make it through all of that if we are looking backward, longing. Back to normal is not going to happen. Building a better world still might.