Doesn't feel like it has ended exactly. Everything's better obviously.

We never had lockdowns or extensive mask wearing here anyway, and people are still getting sick.

My parents have covid right now.

If you'd asked me 2 weeks ago, I would have said that by Fall 2022 we were mostly back to normal, and that by Spring 2023 pretty much all traces of pandemic life were gone. Zoom and WFH had just become a feature of regular life, rather that a pandemic accommodation.

But over the last week me and everyone else in the house got Covid, my wife and I are working remotely for the next week or so, and our kids are home with some online school activities. So it feels a lot like Fall 2020 around here.

For me, June 2022, for the semi-random reason that I moved from a company being excruciatingly careful and having put its back-to-the-office plan on hold, to one where people were already majority back in person (or in some cases, care workers, had never left) and it made sense for me, at least, to come in every day.

heebie, this seems like a good question to add to the questionnaire (month and year)! When I get to it next.

Just over a year ago, when indoor masking became recommended but not required.

Probably summer 2022, when I stopped regularly tracking COVID figures for work, and masking at work was reduced to high-risk areas only. But normal life, in the sense of pre-pandemic life, has never and will never resume, because during the pandemic I got a dog, lost my job, got a new and entirely different job, got a fiancee, got another and also entirely different job, moved to a different country, and bought a ludicrous house.

Sigh.

6: for me the end of the public health emergency feels significant, because I work for a health system, and the Medicaid unwinding as well as changes to Medicare payments feels significant. It's back to business with a vengeance. There were some good social policies during the pandemic that I wish we had been able to keep.

As a society, Montana succumbed to pandemic precaution fatigue pretty early on. Opposition to precautions was a big part of the 2020 election blowout, and our new Republican governor was reversing everything he could -- with full support of the legislature, which also scaled back county health department authority -- from the beginning of 2021. All mask mandates, except airports and hospitals, and I guess the federal courthouse, were gone by March of 2021. Masks were uncommon by the summer -- I'll still see one now and then, but it's very rare. Not quite as rare as before the pandemic, though.

People in my blue city vaxxed, people in the red hinterlands did too, but at lower rates, and the state stopped publishing numbers on either cases or vaxxing.

I got it in Europe in Feb 22, which was pretty inconvenient, but haven't spent any time personally doing much to avoid it since then. I guess I'll get the latest booster when I can find the time.

I don't know, I guess it stopped being a factor in anything I did in mid 2021. I wore masks at the doctors office/hospital, and airports/flights as required, but I can't say I've worn one when not required very much at all.

the Medicaid unwinding as well as changes to Medicare payments feels significant. It's back to business with a vengeance.

The end of ARPA funds is such a disaster. Apparently we're having a massive crisis of childcare facilities shutting down without it, among other things.

8.2: Even California doesn't publish case rates anymore because the data would be useless - most people with COVID get home tests that aren't tracked, or aren't tested. They do publish hospitalizations and deaths, though they did some rejiggering of hospitalization such that the data was delayed or badly formatted for a while, but it's okay now.

I hadn't looked at state vax data in a while but it seems all their official charts have switched to tracking "up to date" which must include all the new formulations as according to those charges only 4.8% of the population is up to date - a rather useless figure. (They're still tracking "fully vaccinated" which I believe is still defined as at least two doses, and that's about 75%, but they're not making that figure easy to find without downloading a dataset or going to a third-party tracker site.)

Of course, the broader impacts will take a lot longer to go away. We got a bunch of new neighbors, some of whom we're probably thinking about their life choices when they woke up yesterday with snow on the ground and 15F in the air, and all the service businesses have help wanted signs. It's become too expensive for service people to live here, and so the seasonal ebb and flow of people to work those jobs has only been ebbing.

I've had six vaccinations, but my cell phone reception is still bad.

Hospitalization update for CA: we hit an all-time low of 669 COVID positive patients in hospitals (not necessarily because of COVID) in June of this year, then rose to a peak of 1,528 in September (vs. a 2022 peak of over 5,000), and now have fallen back down to 1,084 (Oct. 21) and still dropping.

As near as I can tell, the covid poop tracker is useless. Everyone got covid, but the tracker didn't tick up at all.

I was listening to a fiction podcast where, in a March 2020 flashback, someone was talking about the phony smiles/confidence of people on the news saying to trust the one-month lockdown plan, when they clearly had no idea what was happening or how bad things might get, and I thought, okay, it's true things were hugely uncertain back then, and that's something to remember, but in retrospect this was the first time in history we bore up under a major pandemic while applying the best scientific consensus recommendations to the vast majority of the population. We may have done poorly by our own expectations, but those expectations are materially increased.

I was so completely shut in my apartment for at least a year that it felt like I was living in the beginning of 28 Weeks Later so for me the end of it was when the vaccines became available here* so that it felt safe to go out and go back to the pub with my friends and then fly back to the US for my summer leave so that would be March of 2021.

*and they were mandatory, at least if you wanted to keep your job and i was eager to get it anyway.

March of 2021 was my first shot and I was among the first, I think I waited for the vaccine to be more widely distributed here before going to the pub, when I got back from summer leave IIRC. But that was the beginning of the end despite other subsequent waves.

17 me, obvs

Also I was tracking case rates here closely and waiting for them to go down as the vax took effect, we had one of the highest case rates in the world here though thankfully one of the lowest death rates.

16 In early 2021, our legislature helpfully made vax status a protected category, like race or sex, so employers couldn't require it, and really didn't think they should ask.

But normal life, in the sense of pre-pandemic life, has never and will never resume, because during the pandemic I got a dog, lost my job, got a new and entirely different job, got a fiancee, got another and also entirely different job, moved to a different country, and bought a ludicrous house.

Yeah, likewise, for me COVID coincided with a bunch of huge life changes that weren't really directly connected to it but were shaped by the general atmosphere, so it's hard to disentangle.

I think they don't want you to ask about sex either. You're just supposed to look for a penis.

I actually asked a friend, I think in late 2019, to intervene if I hit my 10th anniversary working at the same company. I hit that mid-2021 so I have the most extenuating of circumstances. I left before my 11th anniversary at least.

The pandemic also ended up being when I slowly but distinctly gained back the weight I had lost in 2016. Also highly explanatory circumstances, but I'm still stuck with it for now.

My pandemic ended with my daughter's school reopening: 2020 to mid-April 2021. I had worked from home since 2019, so her being home was about the major difference. also I was vaccinated by then.

Some business travel resumed in late 2021, but the total amount has been permanently reduced, mostly due to Zoom.

A similar cancellation of all business travel happened immediately after 9/11, which lasted about two months, and was also followed by a resumption at a permanently reduced level.

My pandemic ended in early July 2021, when we switched from a nanny in our home to summer day camp out of the home.

Definitely a memorable event, but a 'skip'? Depends on what you did.

Upsides: divorced, got a new gf, got thinner & fitter, did some career redirection & retraining, and we now have much more flexible working (if you are an office worker).

Downsides: uncertainty about long term health impacts (did Covid mess up my vasculature somehow?), will Covid ever really end, general economic hit.

24: Tim's new job is more office-based than his old one. He's home half of the week now whereas before, he was always in the lab even during COVID. think ZOOM/Teams means there will be less travel. Corporate HQ is more cost conscious about it.

I barely had a taste of expensing dinners and then covid stopped it.

21: all those changes (except the fiancée) in my case were directly related to the pandemic.
6: I moved in the right direction for the new job, unlike Jamie Saxt.

29.1: Fair enough.

I do feel like I'm the last person rocking a N95 in the grocery store. The ones I like (duckbill-style) went on disturbingly cheap sale and a bought a few hundred, and I'm willing to reuse them a few times/for a few total hours of use, so I'll probably keep that up as long as supply lasts, at least several more years.

I can report that in Japan, the (now voluntary) masking rate on public transit is around 30-40%.

There's different levels to this question. We were all back in school with masks in fall 2020, but I pulled the kids out of group activities and they missed events like birthday parties until spring 2022. We skied 50+ days in the 20-21 season.

Spring 2021 after the vaccine felt like the worst was over.

College students seem to be a bit better about knowing how to student as of this semester. The learning loss has been real.

Oh, but we didn't get COVID until 2022 (household) and 2023 (me, again.). So....?

Ha, it occurs to me I said above it felt to me like the pandemic ended when I got my new job May 2022, but the first and only time I actually got COVID was August 2022.

Yeah, I don't know, it's never going to be gone, but even when I got it (early 2022) it felt more like just a thing that happens and less like a pandemic. I'd probably feel differently if it had been a near death experience, ventilators and all that, but it was basically a bad cold for a few days (and I had to stay off airplanes and generally out of sight.)

My wife had it this summer, and who knows how many times I've had it without knowing. It just seems more like a part of the landscape, and less like a dangerous plague. Do I enjoy living in a fool's paradise? Why do you ask?

I think the masks and other health-related precautions ended for us in mid to late 2022. But it's funny, despite how little it directly impacted us, its indirect effects or unrelated things that coincided with it were so big that I don't think we'll ever get back to "normal". (On preview, 5 and 21, but the details are different.) We got a car. It caused layoffs at my job and going fully remote and coincided with a big reorganization; put those factors together and I'm not in touch with any of the same people as 4 years ago regularly, and also not seeing their replacements in person. The kid got into a new school, probably because the pandemic caused other people to flee. And we've started spending most of the summers out of town, or sending the kid to do so without us, and that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.

31: i wear my KF94 at the grocery and on public transit. I plan to wear a mask on public transit pretty much forever. I just feel differently about random strangers breathing in my face and like life better with fewer colds.

Covid was a weird period where I did 100% of the grocery shopping. Because I guess I was the least likely to die or the most disposable? Now that my wife has taken that job back, covid is over. Also, we don't have little chocolate chip muffins as often.

Spring-summer of 2021 was weird because my mom was dying, but I was more engaged with others than before because of flying back and forth plus dealing with family. Plus, nursing homes were (necessarily) strict on disease prevention but the hospice was like "everyone is dying or a visitor, do what you want."* I was just glad that we could have a regular funeral with a mass as she wanted. There was some cousin complaining that some other cousin should have worn a mask at the funeral because he wasn't vaccinated, but I was too preoccupied to care.

* We put on masks when the staff was in the room.

My timeline is vague too; when the world shutdown was obvious, but a lot of the remainder was relatively continuous with previous life, because I'd been work from home for several years when the plague hit.

There was a period of "intense Covid", generally marked by stay at home orders and my wife's increasing difficulty in staving off depression. The next two years were "still Covid" but with marked improvements at several points -- a real joyous reunion with friends outdoors in April 2021, getting our first, fortunately mild dose of Covid in September 2021, then the ending of emergency authority this spring. To pick a solid date I'd say spring of this year, when the public emergency end was announced-- even the previously strict about masking stores were under 50% in a few weeks.

I went to a fully masked roleplaying convention (BigBad Con) in fall 2022 and 2023. In 2022, their strict masking stance felt like a reasonable precaution given the state of the world, and visiting the bay area there were lots of masks still being worn in grocery stores, etc. By September 2023 it personally felt more like cosplaying-- outside of the convention, Burlingame was down to maybe 10% masking in convenience stores and restaurants, and none at the overflow hotel. It felt like the con was being extraordinarily inclusive in 2023, taking extra measures to make sure that even people with compromised immune systems could attend - a solicitousness that never would have occurred to me pre-2020.

I had a full year of not being indoors with anyone other than RWM. I struggled a lot with it. Relatively quickly after vaccination we were more-or-less back to normal (going to restaurants and whatnot), except some friends were still stricter (Eg we did pub trivia outside). Fall 2023 classrooms still had masks, and the one time I travelled internationally was kinda weird. I cancelled Christmas travel for Omicron. Then back to normal after Christmas. Got covid in May 2022, that was in Scotland just as they dropped all rules, so we really got quickly used to just fully back to normal and stuck with that in the US.

But yeah, one very weird year, one somewhat weird year but mostly normal, and then no effects after that. Being in a red state surely had some effects, when I visit blue cities I kept being surprised that they were 6+ months behind schedule.

I guess the other way to say that is the pandemic ended for our household around June 2021 (when we visited my parents and realized they were taking way less precautions than we were, when we were justifying limited precautions as not wanting to put them at risk when we visited). But we had significant second-hand effects from other peoples rules and precautions for another year. (And also cancelled travel for Omicron, but that's just one week.)

My office was fully remote until Spring 2022, which was sort of when things felt back to "normal" to me (although we're still WFH two days a week and that was a big change for me).

The other big thing was the University of Toronto's remote learning policy, which went back and forth a bit, because Newt came home when classes went remote. So he was home with me from April 2020 through April 2021, home again for a while that summer, back to Toronto in the fall, and then home again whenever Omicron hit for a couple of months. That was kind of lousy for him, college-experience-wise, but it was lovely having the company at home. I would have been climbing the walls if I'd been living alone through 2020.

I kept up precautions pretty much until recently because I spend a fair amount of time with my parents. I was "out" a lot in 2020 because of my dad's treatments, something like 30 hospital visits (sometimes I was just waiting in the parking lot), a bunch of them during the initial stay-home period. I did all shopping that year, plus regularly went back to check on my apartment back home. My dad's treatments ran into 2021-2022, depending on which cancer. He turned 83 recently.

I still have the same job I did before and I'm still single, so that hasn't changed much. But I went full-time remote and moved to southern California. The pandemic probably did create flexibility so I didn't have to quit when I moved, but I still want to quit eventually. But also want similar pay and benefits.

I don't know what normal for me is. I ignored public health advice and stuck to masking/precautions based on my own sense of risk, based on available data and what my current plans were, so I didn't notice policy changes. I didn't see rapid changes in how other people acted, just gradual dropping of precautions. I am very careful before vacations, especially after canceling one because I got Covid (the only time)*. And am still masking if somewhere is crowded/poorly ventilated/wastewater+hospitalization data shows a rise.

* Almost certainly the result of staying inside too long in a stuffy building in a situation where previously I would have left.

44: My old manager's son was a student at UBC in March 2020 but somehow stayed in Vancouver (I think he was living with his fencing coach so he could keep training or something niche and weird enough to avoid repatriation). Having Washington plates on his car in 2020-21 apparently prompted some fun confrontations.

Between March 2020 and reaching fully vaccinated status in May 2021 I basically saw my girlfriend and occasionally visited my parents and brother on their porches and saw other friends in parks. Girlfriend and I went to the Olympic Peninsula in October 2020 on a trip which precipitated our breakup shortly after. In May 2021 I went to meet up with some friends at a beach house and it occurred to me I was physically touching other human beings for the first time in nearly six months, so that was a real milestone.

After that I started riding public transit (with a mask), doing indoor activities, and dropped all precautions except following what was left of Seattle's mask mandate except for staying in throughout January 2022. I figured the Omicron wave would come and go pretty quickly and I'd thank myself later. Come February the Ukraine War wiped daily covid updates off the front page of the Seattle Times and I think that along with the end of the mask mandates was the end for most.

The consequences of the pandemic have screwed my career up a lot and put a huge damper on my early thirties, but history happens to the best of us, I guess. On top of that I now completely understand why contemporary fiction in the 1920s barely ever mentioned the Spanish flu (pandemics are a mixture of senseless and horrible that makes them really boring).

Yeah, likewise, for me COVID coincided with a bunch of huge life changes that weren't really directly connected to it but were shaped by the general atmosphere

Right, same. By the time masks stopped being obligatory for COVID reasons I was rigorously veiling in public for gender reasons, and that continued to be the case through the end of 2022. My personal pandemic ended that December when the bandages came off.

||

They also underwent the practice of being held by the legs and dangled over a cliff. (This practice, followed by various Shugendo - groups, was intended to frighten the participant with the fear of death and hell and to toughen his discipline; see the figure on page 29.)

That sure sounds like a good way to scare people.

That's kinda like a swirly except with a cliff instead of a toilet bowl.

||

"Even so small a mountain as Kasuga-yama near Nara could support at once the paradises of Amida, Kannon, and Miroku"

It never ended. Just turned into an eternal medium-grade nuisance for me, and a horrifying ongoing tragedy for the people I know with long COVID.

We decided as a society that an R value of slightly-above-1 is good enough, and I'm never going to stop being angry about it.

The endless circulation of the virus being thought acceptable is a no, from me.

Obvs. some people have had a catastrophic Covid. I haven't had any family members affected (that I know of) but a colleague's partner _had a stroke_ and is now in a wheelchair, etc. He was (is?) a committed anti-vaxxer. They both are, perhaps because to be wth an anti-vaxxer is to accept a level of anti-vaxxerdom. Their kid isn't vaccinated - against anything, afaik. I just feel sorry about this, and about the epistemic disaster that has unfolded over the last decades.

33 last: That seems true! Thanks for pointing it out. This semester feels (finally) like a return to normal teaching. It's been a while.

We decided as a society that an R value of slightly-above-1 is good enough, and I'm never going to stop being angry about it.

That sounds like an exhausting way to live.

I mainly worry about hospitalisations - they're low and falling at present, but will probably rise again in winter (as will flu hospitalisations etc). We're back down into negative excess deaths, which is good.

The people I know who seem to have suffered most from COVID are not the ones with some sort of long COVID, but older people and kids who were cut off from their routine and their social circle for long periods. Some of the older people in particular have really gone downhill as a result. Closing schools and universities also seems to have had psychological and social effects that we didn't quite realise at the time - though these may have been partly counterbalanced by lower suicide and eating disorder rates (mental illness spreads through schools).

In some ways, it was over really quickly. In other ways, it has never really ended.

My wife changed careers--2-3 years of retraining, and then she started work as a teacher this autumn--which has been a huge change, and I work from home more or less all of the time,* as there's no practical way to manage childcare if I don't, as there's zero chance she will ever be able to take my son to school, pick him up, or be home when he gets in from school. He starts high school next year, and I'll probably transition back to being in-office a day or two a week. Work life balance for me is quite different from where it was 3 years ago as I'm now the primary contributor (financially) and the primary childcarer, whereas before it was much more 50/50.

I've had COVID multiple times, and while I would definitely be happy to have another round of booster vaccinations in our household, I'm not really intending to make any other changes. I live in a major city with a school-age child, so I'm exposed to a lot of potential infections--not just COVID, but flu, and everything else--and the lifestyle cost of changing how I live my life enough to meaningfully reduce the likelihood of infection significantly is one I am not prepared to bear. I'm not stupid, though, and when anyone in the family has had any respiratory symptoms, we have tested and made sure to minimise contact with others.

None of that intended to minimise the seriousness of what happened, or to dismiss the concerns of people with different priorities.

Like Charlie W in 26.last I do wonder if COVID has affected me in any way, as I had more cardiac symptoms than before for a good while--although I have been thoroughly scanned, monitored, tested, etc. since--which may be a side-effect of COVID (or more probably, doing a lot of cardio exercise while not 100% recovered from COVID). Although, on balance, I'm fitter than I was before COVID.

* I always worked remotely, part of the time, as most of my clients are outside the UK, and most of the team I work with are not based in London, but the real change has been from being hybrid remote/in-office to almost always being remote.

||

"Sanshi challenged the generally accepted religious idea that women were impure, by having one of the women believers stand on the top of Mt Fuji, where the presence of women had been prohibited"

On the one hand I'd absolutely be in favor of some kind of indoor clean air act.

That said, wiping out diseases is very very hard, and by early March 2020 at least it was clear that covid is here forever. So I've never really understood what the "covid isn't over yet" people were expecting to happen.

And saying a pandemic is over isn't saying the disease is gone, it's just saying it's not a pandemic. We still get H1N1 flu, that doesn't mean the Spanish Flu pandemic isn't over. What happens is that eveneyually there's enough partial immunity that it's endemic and not pandemic. And if you look at excess deaths or PIC deaths or any other similar measurement you can see that the dynamics are completely different after January 2022.

My neighbor, who is close to 90, has covid and no one seems worried. At least her daughter wasn't. That's very different from 2020 when people that age got covid and died.

The guy who used to sit by me in church got covid then and apparently lost his memory. But I guess he didn't die until a year later. He must have been 95 or so.

Here's deaths from Pneumonia, Influenza, and Covid (so it'll include pneumonia deaths caused by covid but where the infection was never sequenced), you may need to click on the PIC button at the top. You can see that the dynamics are just utterly different after January 2022.

https://gis.cdc.gov/GRASP/Fluview/mortality.html

Here's the history of pneumonia deaths.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184574/deaths-by-influenza-and-pneumonia-in-the-us-since-1950/

The impact of covid puts us back 10-15 years in our fight against pneumonia deaths, but things now are better in terms of pneumonia deaths than they were in 2000.

Excess deaths paints a similar but rosier picture.

58: I support that too.

56: The part that bugs me though is people who are ok with people who are sick with COVID and know they're sick going to work (even healthcare settings), because that's what we always did for the flu. People went to work and infected other people. And I feel that at a minimum, the norm should be for sick people not to go to work - COVID, flu, dev, whatever. Sure, some people can't not...especially not at the lower end of the SES, but HCWs who gets positive, should stay home for a few days and then wear a mask for a few days in clinic.

Indoor clean air would be good for other reasons - smoke, chemicals and the like. How does one demonstrate support for that?

My uncle (70ish) got covid twice, once over Christmas at the end of 2020, and once in the summer of 2022. The first time he nearly died and was in the hospital for a week, the second time he was totally fine. It's just utterly different. Immune systems are great things.

56: what is the state of the pandemic in the rest of the world? Obviously, when China ended CoVid zero with poor vaccination rates, it was not endemic yet.

Also, endemic isn't necessarily a situation we should just accept without efforts to control - through surveillance vaccination and mitigating transmission. Malaria and TB are endemic in a lot of places but not benign.

Agree with 62.last, which isn't special to covid. I had a close covid exposure recently (didn't get it), so stayed home when possible and then tested and wore a mask until it was clear I hadn't gotten it. As you say, it's always made sense to mask when sick. I don't know how much it helps in practice in a lot of settings (e.g. if you're in a room for a few hours and have to take off the mask now and then to drink I'm not sure it makes a big difference), but especially in a health care or elderly care setting it clearly makes sense. Like hand-washing.

what is the state of the pandemic in the rest of the world?

Over, basically.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://covid19.who.int/

The China post-lockdown spike really jumps out at you from the second one, doesn't it?

The part that bugs me though is people who are ok with people who are sick with COVID and know they're sick going to work (even healthcare settings), because that's what we always did for the flu. People went to work and infected other people.

Am I misreading this, or do you actually mean "people always went to work when they were sick with the flu"?

If I've read it right, that's really bad. Why don't they take sick days?

Yeah, American culture and rules around work and days off is utterly fucked up. Either people don't have sick days, don't have enough sick days, sick days are taken from the same pool as vacation days (of which the average American has 10 days per year), or they're not paid on sick days. Plus many Americans work harder and don't have good work/life balance compared to Europe (flipside of this is we make a lot more money). But yeah, it's bad. Covid has changed the culture somewhat in blue parts of the US, but not that much.

It really is remarkable how bitterly various groups are fighting against sick days. I think part of the reason conservatives hate universities and government jobs is because they employ large numbers of people while providing sick days and vacation time.

68: people didn't stay home long enough with flu. So, healthcare workers aren't supposed to go in if they still need medicine to be free of fever, but they frequently did, because of the combined PTO thing UPETGI mentions and they didn't want to use up all of their time off.. We get a fair amount at my hospital after 5 years, but you used to have to bank it if you wanted to cover paid parental leave, so many avoided calling in sick. Also, the culture in healthcare is that you are letting people down if you aren't there. I think this is because we try to run too lean, and there is not enough slack.

The This Week in Virology Podcast host has been basically saying we should give up on isolating for COVID at all. "Maybe people shouldn't have gone in with flu and infected people, but that's what they always did and it's not going to change." Let's try to change that.

"Dev" in 62 was autocorrect for RSV.

College students seem to be a bit better about knowing how to student as of this semester. The learning loss has been real.

Math-wise, I feel very differently about this. Our kids were in elementary school, Jammies was teaching high school, and me in college, and we concluded that 8-10th graders were hit the hardest, mathwise, because they:
1. were in classes that are incredibly foundational and important
2. were expected to conduct themselves more like high school students and college students than the elementary school kids
3. were actually in the backyard, picking daisies for the entire year.

Then this cohort was just passed along, and with colleges now being test-optional, they found themselves here in my precalculus class, where I discover that they're confused about things like how to plot points on a graph.

The other thing I can't get over is that we gave them an entrance quiz for their own benefit: "Look at these algebra questions. If they're intimidating, that's a sign that you are a better fit for algebra and not precalculus." We collected it, but didn't forcibly switch anyone from one class to another.

Clearly students used photo-math on this stupid ungraded assessment quiz that was designed to keep them out of the class they're currently failing. I mean. Please. Help me help you.

And specifically, it's about 5-6 kids out of 22 students. The rest of the class is truly doing fine.

For these 5-6 kids, maybe it was covid and maybe it's just true ineptitude with math. Either way, they are in way over their head and I hate being in this situation.

73.last is so infuriating and just captures so much about the current state of education. Deans mandate moving diagnostic tests online, students cheat on them, then they fail their classes, then the deans through a fit about DFW rates.

There's only been one David Foster Wallace.

Silly. Dallas-Ft.Worth MSA.

Am I misreading this, or do you actually mean "people always went to work when they were sick with the flu"?

NYC-based FOH restaurant worker for a decade, can confirm.

(Also the pandemic profoundly altered my career, in ways both good and bad; true for basically everybody I know.)

73 and 74: It's really bugged me all the strategies that people have talked about for catching kids up. Is learning loss the right term? Did they lose anything or just not gain at the appropriate rate? The Boston Globe wants to push Teach for America- style add on programs. I think summer school for kids who need and want it is fine, but there should be no shame in having a grade 13 for a few years. People don't want that because of money, but I don't think it was wrong to keep kids out of poorly ventilated schools without good masks. And the pandemic was stressful for a lot of families even if they were at school. It takes time to recover from that. Don't expect everyone to get up to speed right away.

So, one, no one is going to pay for a grade 13 for the poor kids whose schools didn't go back in person like the rich kids whose schools somehow all had magical HVACs regardless of the age of the buildings. They all ought to have been back in person given what we know now.

Two, the problem with early learning loss is that it compounds -- by fourth grade one switches from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." So some kids moved into fourth grade having missed content in 1-3 but without much loss of skills. Some, though, can't read and now it's expected. This isn't fixable by adding schooling onto the end - it's holding back entire school cohorts.

73: my school forcibly or close to it switches people. But where I'm seeing the difference is mostly metacognitive.

47: How are you doing with that? Finished with the facial surgeries and all healed up, or is there more you still have to do?

56: I remember your wife was training for a new career, but hadn't realized she'd started yet. That's terrific, and must make life easier on you both some ways. And your kid isn't many years away from being old enough to manage himself after school, which will make things easier still.

Girlfriend and I went to the Olympic Peninsula in October 2020 on a trip which precipitated our breakup shortly after. In May 2021 I went to meet up with some friends at a beach house and it occurred to me I was physically touching other human beings for the first time in nearly six months, so that was a real milestone.

Sympathies; that sounds rough.

In general, my job was back in the office summer of July 2021, so much of the basic rhythms of my life are the same as normal. On the other hand, I'm not done worrying about COVID. I know multiple people dealing with Long COVID symptoms and so I'm still masking in most indoor settings.

80 and 81: I'm not an educator, and you are, but Tim had 13 years of school in Canada, and it seemed like a good system. We could have treated kids who graduated in 12 years like kids who skip a grade, something especially precocious kids do, but not really desirable. Of course, they're not going to do it. I was just saying what I thought should have happened. High school kids who missed out on opportunities could have had some more of them. I worry that the schools want to drop social stuff and extra curricular to catch the kids up:without regard to their social and emotional development.

I'm not sure they all ought to have been back in person in the spring of 2020 (May/June). It should never be about just the kids, since they are part of society, and they had the capacity to infect high risk people in multi generational households. Also, hindsight is always 2020.

My computer's 2-year-old SSD started putting out "imminent failure" messages yesterday because apparently Samsung's manufacturing process was crap in 2021, so I'm also still feeling the effects of the pandemic.

Progressive topless California just expanded to a whopping five sick days per year (previously three). Part-timers get it too, but it's not available immediately.

He starts high school next year

Wait, what? What does high school mean where you are?

That's when the wizards go to Hogwarts.

85: Two-year-olds love to say "NO!". Bear it no mind.

Possibly pandemic related - just learned through some friends that a guy I knew and was friendly with but not friends with in high school died in February 2021. I knew he got married and had kids young, but according to his memorial page his small business selling bespoke suits failed during the pandemic, coincidentally shortly after his divorce. He moved into a houseboat and it's strongly implied that he drank himself to death, age 31.

I've heard anecdotally from medical professionals that the numbers of people in their 30s and 40s ending up in hospitals due to alcohol problems shot way up during the pandemic. Just another long term effect, I guess.

83: Thanks. Like a lot of things it only really got to me if I thought about it too much.

83: Thanks. Like a lot of things it only really got to me if I thought about it too much.

Our kids did great at remote schooling and show no sign of any loss of learning, so I guess for us the pandemic ended when school returned to in person (fall 2021) and dropped mask requirements around spring of 2022. Since then we've been doing more travel than usual and haven't really changed any other behaviors vs pre-pandemic. Although I keep more food stocked in the basement at any given time which was a pandemic habit.
I've had COVID twice but physically I'm in the best shape of my life because I started running. According to my watch my cardio fitness is above high for my age group, or in the high range for 20-29 year olds. I'm not sure I believe that analysis is anything more than a gimmick to make you keep sharing your data with Apple though.

I know someone who died from alcohol + liver problems in fall 2020. That may have happened anyway except without the pandemic maybe some warning signs would have gotten a follow up. The alcohol problem pre-dated the pandemic but was subtle enough that it hadn't really been acknowledged as far as I could tell. I actually made a note to bring it up with their partner - who I'm closer to - the next time I saw them, but that was in February 2020 and I only saw them once that summer, very briefly, before the funeral.

And Jesus McQueen died in September of 2020 under a similar story.

That was very sad.

95 and 96: Yeah.

Which I weirdly didn't connect with covid until just now. Maybe I did at the time? I thought it was demons and a really awful tragedy, but I don't know if I put it in the context of this discussion with the consequences of isolation of covid.

I don't think a South African style alcohol ban during lockdown was an appropriate response, but the combination of loss of available goods and services to consume -> increased disposable income (even if was just extended UI) + loneliness/despair was kindling for mass substance abuse. Not just booze, but weed, fent, and meth, which cost pennies compared to booze. IIRC Western Australia was basically rationing alcohol purchases (you can only buy so much during your weekly visit to the supermarket, that kind of thing) during their relatively brief and intermittent lockdowns.

Pennsylvania made it easier to get booze without human contact.

99: A weird early Covid thing along those lines in my neighborhood was fireworks. You give people in Upper Manhattan extra spending money when they're bored and under great emotional stress, and they buy recreational explosives.

My aunt in Philadelphia was very pleased with how much better Fine Wine and Good Spirits was when they reopened after initial closure in 2020 if my family e-mail threads was anything to go by.

They would mail you pretty much anything, which they did not before covid. And local brewers could delivery cases to my house.

99: My apartment overlooks the Rainier Valley and fireworks were lighting up the sky almost every night in July/August 202.

Actually, a guy I went to high school with but wasn't close friends with died at about the same time. I never did find out why. He managed clubs.

104 celebrating the return to Rome of Septimius Severus?

84: there's a difference between a school system intentionally designed for thirteen years and one that would develop after the metacognitive and learning loss post-pandemic. I think it's probably best if not ideal to try to get the kids caught up.

It's hard to say what we ought to have done. I kept my kids out of a lot of activities (including the weddings of two of my sisters ) so that other people could put their medically fragile relatives at risk by doing the things that they wanted to do. Neither of my kids could have done remote school (40 kids shouting online with a "teacher" that doesn't know the mute button) and with masks neither of them brought it home. And places with school in session didn't seem to fare worse during 2020-2021. Kids certainly spread it but I guess I still feel like we screwed Gen Z so boomers could wear masks on their chins and refuse to get vaccinated.

I guess I still feel like we screwed Gen Z so boomers could wear masks on their chins and refuse to get vaccinated.

The really frustrating thing for me was how we managed to find ineffectual policies that still disrupted people's lives. A lot of people went back to on-site work, at least a few days a week, after June 2020, even in the states that had more restrictions. Given how much Covid spreads within households, it's not clear that keeping only the kids home was going to be all that effective.

There's a version of history where some states locked down in March 2020 and didn't let up for a year, but that was not my experience in California. I know these are my data-free anecdotal impressions, but there was a huge change in how many people were out before and after about July 1st, 2020.* School closures and restaurant bans probably weren't making a huge difference to Covid when malls and other retail were open and lots of people were not working remotely.

*I saw this most dramatically in a series of hospital visits during the last week of June, where the hospitals felt empty, followed by a return the next week when staff seemed to have doubled.** Staffing never seemed so thin again.

**I think a furlough period ended.

107 and 108: or they were non-whites who died at disproportionate rates and had to work shitty service jobs with inadequate PPE, crappy ventilation and customers/ the public who couldn't be bothered to protect others.

107-109: The way the US treated kids and seniors both through the pandemic was a disgrace. Particularly, elementary and middle schools (I think that encompasses primary schools in Canada and most other developed countries) should have been one of the last physical institutions to close and the first to reopen, if not the last and first. In January 2021 I could go drink two beers at an outdoors table in a brewery while my sister in law was trying to teach a 7th grade class on Zoom.

110: yeah, it was the lack of urgency/priority. My kids are fine, and would have been in any scenario where books existed. The other kids at their title I school? Especially the ESL kids? More struggles, and it's not an easy fix.

Related, the UK COVID inquiry is going on right now, and it's grim watching.

re: 87

There's no notion of "junior high".* In England, kids generally start school at age 4 or 5 (depending on date of birth), then there's 7 years at primary school. At 11 (or 12) you move to high school, and you'll be there for between 5 and 7 years.

So, xelA is 10 now, and will be 11 next summer when he starts high school, and he'll then stay at the same school for between 5 and 7 years, at which point, he'll have finished school. I don't really put any recent photos of him on social media anymore, because he doesn't want me to (and I respect his wishes), but he's looking surprisingly grown up considering he's 10.

* generalising. Some education districts might divide the schools up slightly differently, and private non-state schools often have a different scheme.

Per OP, he's actually 13.

I think xelA did OK during lockdown, as we live close to friends and once it was possible to socialise outside, we did, so the social isolation wasn't as bad as some. One advantage of living in London is that the school catchment area is about a 600 metre radius around the school, so everyone he knows lives within a 10 minute walk and there's enough outside space to go and hang out in a park or kick a ball around.

In terms of education, his school utterly dropped the ball as an institution and the at-home provision was laughably bad for the first lockdown period. His teacher was awful. She was just not working at all as far as I can tell and nothing we've learned since has disabused me of that belief. Total negligence. I still get angry thinking about it. People like me were working full time jobs remotely and full-time educating their kids while she sat at home and did fuck all for 6 months.

The second lockdown, which happened in the following school year, was better as his teacher that year was much more conscientious and the at-home provision was much improved. The major breakthrough for xelA was that with a lot of time at home, he really learned to enjoy reading and his reading level jumped up from about average for his age (he was 7) to reading 500 page books.

My wife is teaching kids who would have been in their first year of school during lockdown, and she's pretty sure a lot of them have suffered fairly major setbacks in their learning, as the first 6 - 9 months of learning to read and being socialised into being in a classroom and learning how to learn and how to be with other kids in a larger group didn't happen properly.

115 tracks with what other people I know are saying - there was a huge variation in how well schools handled remote learning, and a lot of it depended on whether your teacher could be bothered or not. Yes, a lot of difference in outcome is due to home environment - does the child have his own room in which to work, etc - but that isn't the only factor and I'm not even sure it's the main one, though it is definitely what the teachers would like you to think is the main one.

The thing is that school closures had, I would think, at least three different ways to harm kids. The obvious one of simply not learning stuff; the one you mention in 115.last about not learning how to behave in school; and the lack of socialising, especially in rural areas.

I don't know if skip is the right term, but there's been so many life changes that it makes such a hard break. There's certainly no going back, anyway. We moved internationally right beforehand, which included with it not a change of job for me but a significant change in how it was done. once it hit a combination of my wife's paranoia and the lack of local connections meant we felt we had to isolate pretty hard. And in the meantime we lost a cat, my wife got pregnant, her mother passed, she gave birth, we have a lovely baby who's taxing our capacity, we had to move house again, I found out I have ADHD (and am still unmedicated pending supply chain issues), and I finally got covid last month as the last in a series of nursery-derived illnesses. Everything touches the pandemic in some sense--we're still wearing masks on transit, partially because aforementioned paranoia and partially because I've already lost so much time this autumn being sick--but it's rarely the main cause. But I really have much less of a sense of where my life is going now.

re: 116

Yeah. I think a lot of the things written about, e.g. the type of physical learning environment available at home are just buck passing. My son's teacher phoned him, I think, three times in 5 months for about 10 minutes each call. Then, when he sent her emails with his work,* which he was diligently doing at home and was very proud of, she didn't reply. Not once. I think a few of the kids who were her favourites** might have had a bit more feedback based on chats with other parents, but almost everyone experienced an almost total absence.

Joe Wicks' Youtube PE lessons did more to help my son through the first lockdown than his teacher did.

* a mixture of half-arsed stuff set by the school, and more in-depth lessons that were becoming available via platforms like Oak National Academy (very good) and White Rose and which we had sought out.

** pretty, studious, quiet girls.

Yeah.

The opinionated academic has a lot of extremely weird students this year (=the ones who did their sixth form in the pandemic), with a delightful combination of being incredibly fragile, not having learned any of the language they're meant to be studying, and having picked up the full set of tumblr jargon and attitudes. This is bad but an improvement on 2021, which involved fighting the system for nine solid months getting three language assistants through the combination of the new visa regime and the university HR department's incredible level of incompetence*, absolutely murderous levels of stress.

*like they tried to advertise the jobs again, in order to comply with a legal requirement that had been abolished, after they had issued contracts for them and the contracts had been signed by the candidates

110: Outdoor school could have been great in some places. Even in the winter, uou can teach ecology. There are pictures of kids bundled up outside for school during the 1918 flu pandemic.

116, 118: this was our experience. Our district has now implemented "at-home learning" days, so that the kids can have experience with the computer "in case there's another lockdown.". Best case: teacher gives the students some assignments to do in the digital apps asynchronously. Worst case: teacher ghosts the class for a day. What I think is actually going on: the district figured they can use the at-home day as double counted instruction and teacher prep.

And there's a lot of buck passing to parents, but, look, if you design a system that only works for upper middle class families with a stay at home parent, that's actually bad system design, not bad parenting!

The biggest change I see at the college level --- and that's recovering this year -- is stunted metacognitive skills. The transition from the structure of high school to the lack of college structure is always tough, but it's been more like moving from sixth grade to college in terms of just flat-out ability to manage time/priorities/deadlines.

Ace's teacher unofficially told all the students she wasn't doing remote school and they had to come back in person, during the fall of 2020. It was pretty shocking at the time.

My friend who teaches at the same school describes her as "Sadness" from Inside Out, and she wasn't particularly great once the kids were there in person, nor two years later when Rascal had her, but whatever, her job is rough and I'll cut her whatever slack she needs. She needs way more support than she's getting though.

I ate about half of a pound of spice drops and now I don't feel very good. Probably a post-covid thing.

You can also be Sadness from Inside Out.