500 Days of COVID

What I’ve learned navigating the new normal

7 min readMay 14, 2021

Friday, May 14th, 2021, marks 500 days of COVID-19.

On Tuesday, December 31st, 2019, the World Health Organization announced detecting a “pneumonia of unknown cause” in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. (1) So, I find myself asking, “What have I learned?” Was 2020 really just a waste of year? Or is there something to be gleaned from a once-in-a-lifetime (knock wood) pandemic?

For me, learning tends to happen as a result of experiencing gaps in my skills or knowledge. Conflicts reveal these gaps first-hand, in a visceral, often unavoidable way. Learning from these conflicts helps close gaps, but it requires a willingness to take ownership of my shortcomings and responsibility for my growth. What follows explores some of what I’ve learned during the last 500 days.

Caution

Let’s say there’s about a 1% chance (1 in 106) that you will die in a car accident (2). How should knowledge of this probability impact your behavior? I genuinely have no idea how to think about it. It’s a gap that COVID brings up repeatedly.

How should I use probabilities to inform my behavior? When the stakes are life or death, what’s an ok amount of risk?

Does 1 in 106 mean 1 out of every 106 car trips? Does 1 in 106 mean 1 out of every 106 people? What’s the math here precisely? As it turns out, these are “lifetime odds,” meaning the probability of dying in a car accident throughout a lifetime. They are calculated by taking a specific population (328,239,523 people in the US) and dividing it by the number of annual deaths resulting from a particular cause (39,107 car crash deaths in 2019). Thus, the odds of dying from a car accident were 1 in 8,393 people in the US in 2019. To calculate “lifetime odds,” you then divide this number by the average life expectancy of a person born in 2019 (8,393 divided by 79 years gives you 106 or lifetime odds of 1 in 106)(3). Every year, for your entire life, you’re rolling that dice.

So, now what? If I don’t want to die from a car accident, should I avoid driving? At what point do the odds change my behavior? COVID certainly changed my behavior. The CDC put out provisional mortality data earlier last month (4). In 2020, COVID caused approximately 375,000 deaths in the US. Doing the same math above yields lifetime odds of 1 in 11. Of course, it’s not that simple. It’s not “the same”: 2020 was a unique year, we have vaccines now, not everyone died at the same rate, COVID’s an infectious disease, it’s still mutating, we’re still learning, and so on and so on. I’m not sure how to use probabilities to inform my behavior with a “known quantity” like motor vehicle accidents. How do I even begin to do the math and make those kinds of decisions for something like COVID? Should I become an epidemiologist? Or maybe an actuary? Over the last 500 days, I’ve certainly considered it! In a world full of statistics, this gap persists, even if I don’t think twice about getting in my car.

Consent

As I learned more about COVID, I also encountered new gaps in my knowledge and skills. Early on in the pandemic, my wife and I decided to “bubble up” with close friends. This conversation revealed all kinds of gaps. For example, each of the four people in the discussion had different risk tolerance levels (see above and raise it to the 4th power). We also had different understandings of COVID generally (echo chambers of fun!).

How do we come to a shared understanding given such diverse outlooks?

These differences brought up lots of emotions. These emotions made the already tricky conversation even more difficult. Despite the three graduate degrees in counseling among us, I’m not sure everyone felt heard. No one is the best version of themselves when they’re afraid.

Still, we clumsily persisted and managed to agree on an arrangement. At one point, we couldn’t help but notice the similarities between our “COVID bubble” conversations and conversations about sexual intimacy. What were we each comfortable with? What happens if one of us gets sick? What should we do if we’re not feeling quite right but aren’t sure if we’re sick? Is it ok if one of us does a masked, socially distanced, outdoor walk with someone outside of the bubble? What kinds of interactions with people outside the bubble are ok, exactly? To put it plainly, none of us had very much practice with these kinds of conversation.

The experience did, however, get me thinking about affirmative consent (5) and the three pillars of sexual consent:

Knowing exactly what and how much people are agreeing to
Clearly expressing our intent to participate
Deciding freely and voluntarily to participate

It would have been nice to have had some training in these kinds of conversations. It’s challenging to navigate differences of opinion while honoring my own boundaries. I want to be a team player, but I don’t always agree. Reductively, I want to have friends, but I don’t want to get sick. Frankly, why don’t these kinds of conversations happen more frequently across more types of topics (e.g., friendships at work)? It feels like we could all benefit from a little more practice coordinating with each other, no? Why aren’t soft skills (6) taught as routinely as math and science? For all my expertise in analysis, I found myself leaning heavily on my listening skills. I still feel like I came up short and like there’s much to learn.

Connection

A study out of Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project (7) noted that young adults were the hardest hit by loneliness during the pandemic (8). It pointed to “robust social networks” as key to easing pain and avoiding a “downward spiral.” The pandemic forced isolation, which in turn highlighted the importance of human connection.

Before the pandemic, I took for granted a wide range of human interactions.

For example, virtual meetings have stripped social settings of the small, unscripted niceties that play a crucial role in creating relationships between teammates. I miss chatting before the meeting and while walking to the next one. Now, there is no “before the meeting” or “after the meeting,” really. The interactions have agendas, and folks, reasonably suffering from a unique kind of fatigue, are quick to turn off their video and/or log off. The goodbyes always feel a bit rushed and abrupt, as if we were to completely vanish from the room immediately after meeting in person. It’s unsettling.

Moreover, during the pandemic, I’ve joined three new organizations, which means I’ve never actually been in the same room with any of these new people. I have no idea how to create the kinds of interactions that humanize us. The screen mediates my imagination of each of these new people. I don’t know how tall they are, how they smell, or really what “it feels like” to be in the same room with them. It’s strange to have spent so much time with people I’ve never met in person. I genuinely don’t know what to make of this weird feeling — both knowing and not knowing. One of them said it best, “We’ve kind of met,” whatever that means.

Control

This brings me to the final gap in my knowledge and skills. I genuinely don’t know how to get involved in the many layers of governance that have become much more present in my life since the pandemic began. Throughout the pandemic, it’s felt weird to watch the politics play out, sometimes literally costing lives. For example, COVID has revealed the trade-offs between federalism and a more centralized unitary state (9). For the first time, some folks found themselves legally limited in their travel, and that probably felt weird too, especially when your neighbor down the road doesn’t have to abide by the same rules or just chooses not to.

The lessons here stem from how unavoidably connected we are in the 21st Century. Despite its sometimes pejorative use, the word “globalism” (10) comes to mind, as do the realities of the related process of “globalization” (11). COVID has revealed a kind of naivety that previously allowed me to ignore city, county, state, federal, and international policies.

In truth, what happens in China impacts me.

So does what happens in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, California, and now India (12). How much longer can I afford to do little more than vote (13)? Can I really rely on my representatives to act in my best interest? Realistically, what can I do to help on a global scale? What can I do to prevent this kind of thing from happening again?

Well, for me, learning tends to happen as a result of experiencing gaps in my skills or knowledge. Conflicts reveal these gaps first-hand, in a visceral, often unavoidable way. Learning requires a willingness to take ownership of my shortcomings and responsibility for my growth. It’s been 500 days of COVID. I genuinely feel lucky to be alive regardless of the odds. Similarly, I feel hopeful about the future, if not optimistic (14).