i'm young but i'm in several high-risk groups for covid! i've spent 3 years exasperated whenever a colleague would say "oof, at least we don't need to worry"
now we have people celebrating the end of the pandemic, just like we had in 2021 and 2022, but this time, i kind of agree? The pandemic is still here but things are wildly different than they were in 2020!
let's start with 2020. remember three years ago?
bodies were piling in the streets, nobody knew how covid worked, and decent masks were impossible to come by. i spent eight months in fucken van-gogh mode.
we were sanitizing surfaces and trying not to touch our face (lol impossible). we kept 6-foot magic bubbles. we didn't know then that masks and ventilation were the very best preventative measures (if you have to be in a group). we masked up to protest in the summer of 2020, and we all wondered why we didn't get covid (hint: we were outside and distancing and masked and covid hadn't undergone wild mutations.)
outside protesting, socialization meant among-us, zoom, and animal crossing. (at least for me?)
grocery trips felt like playing russian roulette.
and two years, things were better! 2021!
remember fighting for a place for those first vaccine doses? those miraculously effective ones? i got mine on homestuck day, april 13th 2021. (i got most of my doses on cool days btw. i was in line for my booster when i learned queen elizabeth died. hell yeah)
i felt like i could see people again! i could walk in the woods with someone without a mask! i could TALK to a PERSON who was NEXT TO ME!
then, about one year ago in 2022, effective antivirials were generally available!
i got covid at a union organizing event, but at that point, i had three vaccines and i was able to get paxlovid! amazing!
at this point, i was regularly going to grocery stores and even seeing people every few months! i even had a friend over from a big city!
i had so many tests (and i still do!) i have much tighter priors on Whether I Have The Plague Or Not.
and now, in 2023, people are proclaiming the End Of The Pandemic. The end of the public health emergency, etc.
This is bullshit of course: Covid is an airborne disease that is still infecting people, and either killing them or giving them long-term illnesses. You don't want to get covid!
But, fuck me, I want to celebrate too! We are in a place worth celebrating! We are in a place that I was actively fantasizing about three years ago! Ignoring All The Other Horrible Things Going On.
TLDR: i'm so happy that covid in 2023 is much less scary than covid in 2020