Maybe you've already had your fill of "looking back at Covid" stories—I've honestly been avoiding them myself.
But five years is a milestone, and while we've never stopped talking about the pandemic, we've also never come to terms with it as a society. There are a lot of "how Covid changed us," stories about how individuals and institutions and businesses adpated in response to conditions. But maybe the real story is about how we failed to change, how the United States and late capitalism are so brittle and unyielding that they can't adapt to crises.
And sometimes we're so focused on the cultural effects of Covid we skate past the fact that 1.2 million people died. That's a lot of people. We still don't know how many suffer from lingering effects of the virus.
Without Covid, there would be no Racket. The economic downturn of 2020 was the Star Tribune's justification for shutting City Pages down, leaving Racket's four eventual co-founders in need of work. (Read the Strib's story, featuring zero quotes from CP workers, here.) More importantly, we were able to plan for the future because for one tiny moment the U.S. had something like a functioning safety net. No expanded unemployment benefits, no Racket.
On a personal note, I'm one of the people who never got Covid, or at least I was never diagnosed with it. I did have a nasty chest cold when the pandemic was declared, and I was certain it must have been Covid, and I spent a week compulsively checking my temperature. What a scary time those early days were.
That's enough from me. What were your Covid experiences? Did you have any significant health scares? Did you lose someone close to you? Did it change your priorities?
Of course, feel free to ignore this prompt and talk about whatever you want. This is your Open Thread, after all.
