Dealing with pandemic PTSD

I’d like a show of hands for how many of you tested positive for COVID this summer. Or felt like heck but didn’t have any tests on-hand. Or self-diagnosed your distress as summer flu, even though this isn’t flu season.

I thought so.

I’m pretty sure I was infected at an otherwise lovely wedding. A week later, a number of us developed the sore throat/fever/exceptional tiredness that seemed like COVID. I did test, and the 15-minute test strip took all of 15 seconds to confirm why I felt so cruddy.

What a difference four years makes. This same disease that filled us with dread in 2020 and killed more than a million of our fellow Americans is now, for many of us, just endured, or treated with Paxlovid. One would have to look far and wide to learn that 30,000 Americans have died from COVID so far this year. We are intent on putting the trauma of our plague years behind us. No one’s really tracking it very closely because folks aren’t testing routinely. Only our waste water confirms that the COVID-19 pathogen is still infecting and occasionally killing.

Nicholas Christakis, who wrote one of the first popular books on COVID, predicted in 2020 that “over very long time frames, we reach an uneasy genetic truce” with plague pathogens. But he also said that pandemics are sociological as well as biological. “There is a social end to pandemics, too, when the fear, anxiety, and socioeconomic disruptions have either declined or simply come to be accepted as an ordinary fact of life.”

Since COVID is still evolving, I think it is too soon to say we’ve reached a genetic truce, but it is certainly easy to say we’ve accepted it as just one more of life’s indignities.

What my latest bout with COVID reminds me, however, is that most of us have repressed the trauma of 2020 and 2021, when the morgues overflowed and nursing homes became killing zones. We’ve forgotten wiping down our groceries and scrounging for masks or wearing hopelessly inadequate homemade ones.

We’ve forgotten the wave of deaths on cruise ships like the Diamond Princess, stranded offshore from Japan because officials wouldn’t let the possibly infected passengers disembark. We’ve forgotten medical systems on the verge of collapse, a shortage of ventilators, and people holding signs up outside hospitals to thank nurses who risked their lives to care for the sick. We’ve forgotten the scourge of long COVID.
We also forgot neighbors checking up on each other, and a million acts of mercy like bringing medicine or soup to a sick friend (though maintaining six feet of distance).

If it was the worst of times, it was also the best of times. We lost a lot of people, but, at first, we rallied around each other. For a time, our better angels prevailed.

Later, not so much. We ended up dividing over what the best response to the pandemic should have been. Should churches have been closed? Were masks necessary? Are vaccines safe even if their creation was a medical and technological miracle?

As leaders struggled to make the right calls, we second-guessed them. Our distrust of institutions, of experts, of each other worsened even as we did find ways to fight the disease.

Four years later, we continue to live with the impact of the political, medical and social responses to the plague even as we repress how scary, how bad it was for a while.

Remembering the trauma, the PTSD of the pandemic, may be a way for us to also remember the courage, the unity we found in the midst of tragedy.

There are other threats on the horizon now: Bird flu and Mpox and pathogens we haven’t encountered yet. Remembering our past may help us to prepare for what comes next.

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