Surviving the COVID-19 pandemic: A 5-year progress report

“Retirement simulator” — that was what my friends and I called it when our jobs started to pay us to stay home during quarantine.

The day was March 20, 2020 when my manager let us know we were shutting down for a while — the same day Animal Crossing: New Horizons released worldwide. Then, it was two months of decorating virtual islands with friends I could no longer see in person and being at home so much that my dog got sick of me.

Five years later, it feels surreal to look back at the COVID-19 pandemic. I mean, has it really been that long? I still catch myself dating assignments for 2019 as if my brain refuses to process that COVID happened.

But there are also things that feel forever changed, little changes here and there to prove those lost years really happened, like mask requirements in medical facilities, the increasing prevalence of online classes, and not breathing down strangers’ necks in grocery lines.

Bear with me here, but I might even say that some of the changes that resulted from the pandemic are for the better.

I was just as miserable as the next person to be in lockdown and see nothing but death tolls on the news every day. But they say hindsight is 20/20, and I have a certain appreciation for some of the changes we made as a society.

For example, why had none of us really considered the ick of having someone basically spit all over a birthday cake before cutting it up and serving it to everyone?

Few people now question getting asked to put a mask on if you step inside a care home or hospital. Sure, why not? There are seniors and patients around, I’ll put on a mask for their sake. Of course, there are still some vocal anti-maskers, but they feel fewer (or at least quieter) now than during the pandemic. 

There are other little societal standards that I feel changed for the better, too.

What was with coffee shops keeping their mobile orders out in the open anyway? All it did was mean four separate strangers were touching and picking up my drink by mistake before I got there.

Sure, it takes an extra five seconds for the barista to grab the right order from behind the counter, but some of us don’t like being paranoid about having our drinks left in the open.

A lot of the more permanent changes that came with COVID-19 make sense in my eyes. Ironically, there are a few changes that really don’t seem to make any sense, especially regarding people’s perceptions on public health efforts.

Vaccine hesitancy has been on the rise across the world, which doesn’t compute well when we think about how COVID-19 vaccines played a huge role in getting us out of the nightmare years of 2020 to 2022.

But people trust vaccines less now, and we’re seeing measles outbreaks due to a lack of vaccinations. Yes, measles … in 2025.

A lot has changed for the better as we learned to adapt to COVID, but it feels we have taken two steps forward and one step back.

We survived the pandemic, but we somehow trust modern medicine a lot less. This begs the question: What will happen when the next global pandemic strikes?