UNITED STATES—It is hard to believe this week marks five years since the COVID-19 pandemic totally changed the United States, hell the world. Time sort of flies sometimes when you don’t think about it, and when someone brought it up this week it got me thinking. March 2020 one minute all was fine, the next thing doors were shuttered, stay-at-home orders were issued, kids stopped going to school, people lost their jobs and thousands of people who caught Coronavirus died.
I don’t care if you believe COVID-19 was real or a hoax, that is not the point, lives were changed by the pandemic. I lost my grandfather who caught COVID-19 and it took him out. Please don’t try to debate me on this, my grandfather was healthy as hell to be knocking on 100. He could walk up and down the stairs better than people in their 40s and 50s. He was healthy and I know that 2000 percent. He caught it and within three days he was gone.
It was a wakeup call in the scariest ways that life is so short, and you should never take it for granted. I remember vividly because my family was about to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Yeah, people are surprised all the time when I tell them that I’m Irish. Their response is, “But you’re Black.” And I’m like, “And?” I may look Black on the outside, but I have much more going on in the inside than people know. My mother is biracial, my grandfather was White and his parents were Irish, so that explains a little bit of my heritage and that’s just on my mother’s side.
With that said, I remember the pandemic because I was on crutches. I had injured my foot and was hobbling around with those crutches. I remember being at the mall over the weekend and wondering why the traffic was so dead, only to turn on the news on Monday and realize that a State of Emergency had been issued in the state I lived in. Schools shuttered, businesses were forced to close their doors because of a massive health concern was at risk. My sister had been laid off from her job and then the government was put into disarray because people needed money to pay bills, to live.
Never in a million years did I expect hand sanitizer, cleaning wipes and face masks to become the most sought out items. If you had them you were golden, if not, you were searching for ways to find them. You were paying $5 for a small sanitizer and cleaning wipes that used to be $1 to $2 bucks, shot up to $6 to $7 bucks, if not more. Bleach used to be under $3 but skyrocketed to $8 to $10 (fyi that price still hasn’t changed for the cleaning substance at many retailers).
Places were running out of toilet paper and paper towels. It was simply pure chaos. I was an essential worker, so I was employed at an establishment where I had to show up to work every day and it was just a madhouse. I could only imagine the stress that doctors and nurses in particular had to deal with as they watched people die without being able to be in the presence of their loved ones out of fear of catching the deadly virus.
The pandemic placed a level of stress on people that I don’t think we truly realize, or we’ll ever fully recover from it. Everything closed. Gyms, hair salons, barbershops, restaurants, clothing stores, movie theaters, you name it, it was pretty much closed, except grocery stores and some fast-food restaurants that were allowed for carryout ONLY. No dining in people. I cooked so much at home, that one day that I got off a week, and I stocked up on groceries and got carry out was a treat. I was masked up, but the notion of staying in a house is just something that would drive me crazy, so I don’t understand how some people did it for like two-three months. I would have lost my literal mind.
I don’t even want to get into all the money the government was dishing out, and all the fraud that was caused as a result of the PPP loans that the banks seemed to give to people who didn’t need it, but the smaller businesses who truly needed that money to survive and did the right thing with those funds it was like pulling teeth for them to get it. Yeah, I get people needed money, but not the rich and famous, the smaller guy needed those funds more.
Like if you told me the government was going to be giving out checks in 2020, I would have told you NOT IN A MILLION YEARS. But it happened, not once, not twice, but three times. The big question is what the hell did so many Americans do with it. I saved mine and used it to pay off bills. Others went on lavish shopping sprees, and let’s not talk about the unemployment thing. I mean the government made it so that it was worthwhile to NOT return to work because you were making more money on unemployment than going to actual work. That is just crazy and I knew people getting thousands of dollars each month and do absolutely nothing with it, just a complete bummer.
The world was a mess in the early stage of the pandemic because no one truly knew what was going on and it was all sorts of misinformation about the virus out there, with people being censored, some untruths being told and just madness in the worst way possible. If you don’t want to wear a mask so be it. However, if a private business denies you entry because you don’t have a mask you can’t be upset, it’s a private business and they had that right during the pandemic and still do if they wanted to in 2025.
It is just amazing how quickly time flies. I will admit 2020 made it savory to work from home and started a trend that has become a norm because let’s face it there are some jobs you can do from home, hell the news was the one I thought was not possible, but in my local market they were telling the news via Zoom, and it worked. It was indeed a crazy time, I’m glad it’s over, but nothing in my lifetime had ever happened like the COVID-19 pandemic and I hope to never see anything like it again as long as I live.
