What 2020 was really like

I want this one on the record. Someday a person who was not alive for it, or was too young to remember, is going to want to know what it was actually like to live through the pandemic. This is one person’s honest answer, written from the chair I sat in for most of it, with the feelings left in. Some of what I am going to say is opinion, and strong opinion, and I will tell you plainly when it is. But I lived it, and I am not going to sand it down.

I was already home

To explain why the pandemic landed on me the strange way it did, I have to back up to the end of 2019. By then I had been writing software professionally for about thirteen years, and I was working at a healthcare company with a forty-five-minute commute each way. The commute was grinding me down. I was giving up something like an hour and a half of my life every single day to sit in a car, and I wanted that time back.

There was a second reason, a softer one. My cat was getting older. She is still with me as I write this, and we are not near the end, but I could see, in the abstract way you sometimes can, that she would not be around forever. The idea of leaving her alone in the house eight hours a day, every day, for whatever years she had left, started to bother me. I wanted to be home with her.

So at the end of 2019 I went looking for a remote job, and I genuinely did not care about the title or the salary. I just wanted mobile or iOS work I could do from my house. I found a wonderful company called Very, went through the usual gauntlet programmers go through, got the offer, and resigned. I started there around November 2019, and I have not driven to a job since. More than six years now, all of it from the same room I am writing this in. It is the best change I ever made to how I work.

Here is the part I could not have known. About four months after I rearranged my whole life to work from home, the entire world did it too, all at once, not by choice. I thought I had quietly found a better way to live. Then the same setup got handed to everyone on earth under the worst possible circumstances.

The rumblings

Sometime in February 2020, the news started carrying stories about a strange new virus spreading in China. There was this low hum in the air that something unusual was happening. But I want to be honest about my first reaction, because I think a lot of Americans felt the same way: I was skeptical that it would amount to much.

The reason is that I had lived through a string of these scares. Swine flu when I was at college, West Nile before that, bird flu, SARS. Every few years the media seemed to warn that the next great plague was here, and every time, for me and the people around me, life went on basically unchanged. Nobody, in all my schooling or upbringing, had ever sat me down and said: a real pandemic is possible, and here is what it will actually look like when it comes. So when this one started, my honest gut read was that it was probably another headline that would blow over.

It was not.

When it got real

By the middle of March, the tone changed completely. The early hotspot outside Asia turned out to be Italy, and watching northern Italy get overwhelmed is when a lot of us finally understood this was different. The World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11. The United States declared a national emergency on March 13. And then, fast, the whole structure of normal life came apart.

Offices sent everyone home. Schools flipped from classrooms to laptops. The stock market crashed in a series of brutal days that March, the worst single drops in decades. Grocery stores started limiting hours, setting aside early windows for elderly shoppers, and requiring masks to come in. Restaurants put up plastic barriers and went order-at-the-door, or stopped letting you inside at all. The news kept telling us to support local businesses because a lot of them were not going to survive this, so I would call a small place, order over the phone, and pick the food up from a spot where you touched nothing and saw no one. For a good six months, that was life. You did not interact with anybody.

The masks

The thing that became the strangest fight of all was masks, and I had a particular angle on it. I had already come to respect a habit common across a lot of Asian cultures, and something I associated with Japan: if you are sick and you have to be out in public, you put a mask on. Not for yourself, for everyone else. It says, I am not feeling well, I am keeping my germs to myself, I am looking out for you. I thought that was a genuinely considerate way for a society to behave, long before any of this started.

So when masks showed up here, it did not feel like an imposition to me. It felt obvious. Which made what happened next so hard to watch.

The part I will not let history rewrite

Here is where the opinion comes in, and I am stating it on purpose, because I think it matters that a regular person who was there writes it down before anyone gets to smooth it over.

The Trump administration’s response to the pandemic was, in my judgment, a catastrophe of incompetence and dishonesty. Week after week, the president stood at a podium and contradicted his own scientists. It was serious, then it was nothing. It would be gone by a certain date, gone by Easter, basically already over, even as hospitals were overwhelmed and people were dying in numbers that were impossible to wave away. He spent an enormous amount of energy blaming China and almost none taking responsibility for protecting Americans. He called it the “China virus” and the “kung flu,” language that tracked with a real, ugly rise in attacks on Asian Americans. In a televised briefing in April 2020, he mused out loud about whether injecting disinfectant might clear the virus, and pushed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment with a “what do you have to lose” shrug while the evidence said otherwise. A whole swamp of miracle cures followed in the culture, right down to people taking ivermectin, a livestock dewormer.

And the single most damaging thing he did was turn the most basic protective measures into team colors. Instead of saying three simple things, close the borders the way most of the world did, wear a mask, wash your hands, he made wearing a mask into a marker of weakness and the other side, and treated the people trying to be careful as the problem. He took a virus and turned it into a reason for Americans to hate each other.

I will fact-check my own anger here, because I would rather be accurate than loud. People sometimes say “millions of Americans died.” The real figure is more than a million Americans, and millions worldwide, and a serious share of those deaths were preventable. That is not a smaller number. That is a number so large it stops meaning anything, and a lot of it did not have to happen.

I know this is a controversial take to put on a public page, especially now. As I write this, that same person is back in office, having won again in 2024, which is exactly why I want it written down. History tends to go one of two ways with a figure like this. Either it gets sanded and rewritten until he looks like a steady hand, or it records what actually happened. So let me be a primary source: do not let anyone tell you later that the administration did its best, or that nobody could have done better. The lying was constant, the response was incompetent, and the politicization was a choice. I lived through it. That is what it was.

What my year actually looked like

Strip away the news and my actual days were quiet, and honestly not bad, which is its own strange thing to admit about a catastrophe. I had already been home for months, so the isolation was not the shock for me that it was for everyone else. I played a lot of Animal Crossing, which came out that exact March and turned out to be the soft escape the whole planet needed at once. I got deeper into learning Japanese and started meeting a tutor over Zoom. I cooked at home constantly, because going to the grocery store was a planned operation. And I made a friend, Mary, right at the start of all of it, which turned out to be one of the best things the year gave me.

Mostly I sat at home and wondered if I would ever get to travel. I had been planning to finally visit Japan that spring, now that I had a remote job and some money saved, maybe even work from there for a while. The flights were empty or canceled and the borders were closed, so that dream just sat on a shelf. I would not actually make it to Japan until 2023.

Getting out again

Travel came back slowly, and a vaccine was the key that unlocked it. I got vaccinated in 2021, partly with travel in mind. My first real trip back out was to Miami at the end of 2021 to take a Japanese exam, and planes still required masks then, which I was glad about, because it genuinely cut down the spread in the air. I got a later round of shots before a work trip my company sent me on to the Dominican Republic, where I met my remote coworkers in person for the very first time. I was still nervous about catching it, so I masked on the plane, and the trip turned out fine. By the time I finally got to Japan in 2023, vaccine cards were not even being asked for anymore.

When I finally got it

I did not catch COVID in that first year. I dodged it for a couple of years by being careful, and then, once my guard came down a little, it got me, and it was awful.

My first symptom was bizarre. The muscles in the backs of my legs felt like they were trying to detach from my body, a deep, near-excruciating ache. I had no idea what it was. I kept stretching, drinking electrolytes, eating bananas, thinking I had somehow worn my legs out. By the next day I was cycling hard between freezing and burning, with a high fever, a brutal cough, and my sinuses wrecked. The worst of it hit in about a day, and it was as sick as I had been in a long time.

By then the government had flooded the country with free tests, so most people I knew, me included, had a stockpile under the sink. Every sniffle for years ended the same way: go swab the back of your nose with a Q-tip, which is its own special misery, and wait to see one line or two. Plenty of times you were sure you had it and the test said no, and you felt better just seeing it. The time I actually did have it, the test was not a surprise. And the thing that got me through was my friends. Mary and Tina sent me soup and sandwiches to make me feel better, and it worked, the food and the fact that someone bothered.

What I actually believe

So here is where I land, and I will try to land on grace instead of just anger.

I do not think this had to divide us. If we had simply done a few basic things, masked when we were sick or in crowded places, washed our hands, kept some distance early while we figured out what we were dealing with, I believe we would have been largely fine. None of that was extreme. Most of the world did some version of it. The damage came from taking those small, decent acts and turning them into a war between Americans, and I believe that choice cost an enormous number of lives.

My honest fear is that the division it opened is not fixable, at least not soon, probably not for most of the rest of my life. But the small dream I had at the very start of this is still the one I hold: that we would come out of it having quietly adopted the habit I admired in the first place. That if you are not feeling well and you still have to be out around people, you put on a little mask, no shame in it, just consideration. It is for other people, not for you. We could have learned that. I still hope, eventually, that we do.