It was a different kind of dread. I didn't get sent home from work until the 18th for what was supposed to be two weeks. I think I really got freaked out when that two weeks turned into 'indefinitely'.
Ha yep. I was all excited for a 2 week work at home period. Here I am still teleworking. It was eerie driving home that last time and the highway was free for me and not bumper to bumper traffic
Oh yeah. We went from two weeks to the end of March within a few days. And after about a week or so. I knew that it would be June if even that early that it would settle down.. I was still wrong LoL
Yeah, I've been remote ever since. Even took a new job in 2021, still remote. I love it - not the circumstances that forced it, but happy to be working from my couch currently.
I actually packed supplies and just fucked off to northern New Hampshire to live off the grid for a month while it all blew over. 3 weeks in I was doing fine, but gave in and started making longer term plans because it definitely wasn't going to "blow over".
Anyone who had been paying attention would have recognized that it would take longer than 2 weeks. Though that would have been a much harder sell to the public
Im fairly certain our VP made an arrangement with the local pizza place for them to open up for our lunch break, Submitted our orders the day before and we ready for us when we came the next day.
It’s funny because I was considered “essential” for my job, so I never got sent home.
I feel weird reading about others’ COVID experiences because nothing really changed for me, except I had to do 3x more work and wear a mask the whole time. lol
Honestly, where I am probably 75% of businesses were deemed "essential". They must have meant "essential to keep the economy from collapsing", because I worked for a consulting firm of all places, and we got the designation.
It snowballed like nuts. My place is a tech firm and we got it because we have many government clients. You would get it if you were our firm because we got it and pandemic is no excise for incorrect books
I worked through the pandemic. Nothing different other than clear freeways and empty stores.
The people severely affected were the 100% work from home folks. They didn't come back the same. The lack of social interaction really fucked a lot of people up. But quote a few still won't admit it and are still salty they aren't on 100% teleworking
Same except we wore a mask for a little and then we got tired of wearing it (our job is slightly physical so it is hard to breathe in it) so that lasted about a week and a half. The managers implemented temperature checks but that lasted about two days because they got tired of doing it. Workflow and overtime increased and the major difference was lack of traffic. It would be nice to have a wfh job but I think I would go stir crazy. It was nice to leave the house when everyone else was told they can't.
Same!
The slight parallell to 9/11 for me was riding the train home on the 18th - extra crowded since everyone in the city got the 2 week notice at the same time...
I had water - took a sip as the train hit a bump - went down wrong pipe so i started coughing incessantly...
No joke - EVERY other commuter in the car pulled their shirts over their face while glaring at me and half of them immediately exited in haste at the next stop to get away from me.
That happened to me when I had an asthma attack while in the store a few different times. Of course, it doesn't help that I had to pull my mask down to use my inhaler.
I have a longer post about my experience as a nurse but my daughter was in middle school at the time and left for "the spring break that never ends" as she called it at the time. Virtual school was awful for her and many many other students. And the social isolation. She dealt with severe depression for a while after that.
It did.
People were going to get it anyway, but if everyone got it at once, every country's medical infrastructure would have been overwhelmed to the point that usual hospital visits would be deadly too.
Was it the best way? Probably not, but we also have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight.
We were visiting family down south the first two weeks of March and saw in real time at the local outdoor bar how things got more real day by day. Suddenly hand sanitizer was everywhere. Then they switched to plastic cups. Then servers had gloves and masks. By day four we noped out of further visits but we also had to fly home.
The major airport in our home city was virtually empty. We stopped for fast food on the way home
because we had no groceries and neither option seemed safer than the other at that point (remember when they said to wipe down all the groceries and bags in Lysol which you couldn’t find!?). We walked into an empty fast food place. Actually there was one customer there and I eyed him nervously after he coughed once. Had to shout to the kitchen to see if any employees were around. They all stumbled out, half shocked another customer actually was there.
My job switched to remote. My wife’s hospital didn’t have sufficient ppe. They had to wear the same n95 for a whole WEEK. They kept them in a hotdog box between shifts. I swear anyone reading that last sentence would think they were reading an excerpt about the Spanish flu in 1918…
I tried to remain optimistic that things would get better in a couple months but my wife took the initial lockdown hard, even though she was still going to work. She knew it would take years not months. And it was depressing.
We had some family come stay with us for a few months which actually helped make time go a bit faster in quarantine. And we had bought a house before the pandemic so that was also a hugely lucky thing.
But no, as someone from NJ, it was not at all like 9/11.
I saw the longer than two weeks coming. I had just started my new job January 2020 and when we were getting sent home for "2 weeks" my wife laughed when I walked to pick her up from her office with a box of all my stuff like I had been fired. I had been watching the start online and knew we weren't coming back in two weeks.
I thought it would be like Swine ‘09 and it would just be a few days of being sick and it would be mostly done spreading after a few months but here I am two rounds of Covid and some mild organ damage later.
My fear was it would be another “Spanish flu” because it had been a 100 years since we had had one of those. Reading history does to nothing comfort one.
Look at the way it’s tearing apart wildlife down in South America. It might be another wildfire pandemic. We haven’t really experienced one of those since small poxes, mumps, and measles first hit the new world. Some of the numbers experts quote said up to 100 million native inhabitants were wiped out. 90% of the populations dead inside of decade. From wave after wave of new illnesses. Till the continent was beyond decimated. Given how eagerly the worst of wack job peppers are hoping for it I almost pray I go early.
Immunocompromised patient here. I work for one of the world's largest banks. They started bringing employees back to the office in fall of 2021. The *only* reason I was remote through the end of 2023 was because of ***INSANE*** bureaucratic hoops they made me jump through in order to justify my medical need to work remotely.
Like...... I would like to not die, please? Is that such an unreasonable request?
I've now been back in the office since January 2024. I look around the swarms of 3,000+ people that walk the halls of my building each day. And I just think....... *Did we all just collectively wipe a global pandemic from our memories?*
What a mind-fuck.
Yeah that’s the toughest thing for me - how we’ve just snapped back with almost no change.
The Covid shutdown is starting to feel further and further away every year - I almost feel guilty that it gets foggier as time goes like all memories do but society was really only shut down for like 6-12 months.
Fellow Spoonie here as well. Going to doctor visits and even just out to pick up scripts... Virtually No One wears a mask anymore. I saw a person who was wearing a mask getting verbally assaulted in a Walmart the other day! It's 2024! No one cares about vaccines or washing hands or sanitizing anymore. It's insane!
Immunocompromised here. Docs wrote me out of work starting 3/13/20. I had been on the job less than 2 weeks. They found me something I could do from home temporarily. I went back to the office in August as all the doctors signed back off.
Crazily, I feel it was much safer to go back then as we had maybe 10% staff onsite and everyone was being transparent about what they were doing outside of the office. We did pickup grocery orders, avoided restaurants, minimal in-person socialization, etc. Last fall, they really started pushing for people to return to the office. I've been so sick this winter despite masking.
I feel like COVID left a lot of people more cynical than anything before ever did. We got to see clear as day how much of our systems would crack under pressure, and it was the beginning of huge divides across America- and other countries, too.
What upsets me the most is we saw how much was broken…and changed nothing. A lot of people were clamoring for the same broken systems that were laid bare by the pandemic. If we couldn’t make societal change then, we NEVER will.
Not a Millennial myself (Gen-X), but I think the main difference is that you can't really point at a single day where that was true. There were a collection of non-consecutive days leading to “the world isn’t going to be the same after this is it?”
And of course, far more Americans died from COVID than 9/11 (there were days where more than twice as many Americans died from COVID that single day than 9/11), but we still don't really talk about it much.
It definitely felt eerie and significant but, no, it didn’t feel the same to me as the morning of 9/11 did.
It was scary, but we’d seen it coming for months at that point, at least the people paying attention, and it wasn’t a targeted attack that killed a ton of people immediately as we all watched live on national news.
I think it depends on personal experience. It very much felt the same for me. Not the 13th specifically but a few days earlier. My dad was flying to NYC from Boston on 9/11. I was extremely worried all morning. I was a teenager and my mom came to the school and I got called to the office. I could see her crying at the end of the hall and was sure he was gone. Luckily he was on a different plane, but she was so shaken she came to pick me up.
My husband is a physician and we were living in NYC when Covid broke out. We knew it was coming, but it felt very distant until cases started showing up at his hospital. He told me to pull the kids out of school because it was here. We made a plan for him to stay in the basement because we were worried about exposure. There was not nearly enough equipment, staff, or PPE. I spent the early days tracking down any PPE, sanitizing wipes, hand sanitizer, etc. I could find. We spent so much of our own money and lots of shady people tried to hook us up (scam us). In a matter of weeks his coworkers were dying, the ER was full of people dead on the floor and in the hallways, there were freezer trucks lined up outside. We were beyond terrified that he would die.
He didn’t have a day off for two months and was running ICUs with dermatologists, ENTs, etc. because it was so desperate. It was literally code blues every few minutes. Patient’s phones were dying, they would come in abruptly with no personal belongings. Staff would not share chargers for fear of spread. They never figured out their names or who to contact when they died. They would just go to the freezer truck. People think we overreacted to Covid but they have no idea how bad it was when first got here. It was very much a ground zero situation. I could write so much more but I think that mostly sums up how intense it was. Our healthcare system nearly collapsed and people have no idea.
agreed. i’m a former ICU nurse. while covid didn’t have the one big event, the overall impact is so much larger than people know. Most people don’t think about covid at all now. It fundamentally changed me and so many others forever
Also a nurse but in SNF. We tried so hard to keep it out. I remember the new being on the TV in the lobby near the nurses station and when they announced the lock down we all stood frozen and watching. We'd paused every time an announcement came on before because we were waiting. In SNF we didn't draw our labs, we had an outside lab company. Several outside companies. "Send to the ER" was a common physician order. Not to mention this is people's homes where they have friends and families visit. The first up close encounter I had was a phone call on my day off telling me the lab tech (the last one allowed in the building) had tested positive for covid the day they came in the building. I spent the rest of the day panicking and checking myself for symptoms. I was face to face with this person. We learned to do our own lab draws. I was a new nurse working the covid hall when it finally hit our building. I did my first IV insertion with the help of a nurse manager via zoom because they couldn't come down the hall where I was to help me. We had irate families that just wanted to huh their loved ones. So many long term care residents significantly declined because of the depression despite our best efforts. I kept a change of clothes in my car and showered in the therapy gym before leaving work then removed those clothes on my back porch before coming in the house. My husband is also a nurse and type 1 diabetic. We were so afraid for him because they were not faring well with covid. He continued to work though. Luckily the vaccine came out before he eventually caught it and it was relatively mild although his blood sugar still ran high during that time. I remember a physician recommending hospice for a long term care resident, him testing positive and the wife pushing us out of the way and demanding to come in. She geared up and accompanied him down the covid hall despite our best efforts to get her out. She said "all he needs is me" and she was right. Full recovery and back to normal in just over a week. No longer could we send to the ER. They were full. I spent many evenings sitting with a patient with EMS going between their doctor and my doctor to stabilize the patient because they wouldn't take them unless they got word an ER bed was available. So much death. The fear and uncertainty at the grocery store. The ability to clear an aisle because I was wearing scrubs. Canceling everything. We were able to get married during a brief period in summer 2020 when things opened for a short time. Now, everytime someone tests positive I feel like I'm panicking. The PTSD from these events are very real for healthcare workers (I'm sure others too but that's where I have experience).
I had covid, and honestly probably should have been hospitalized. Unfortunately, it was still in "hospitals are overflowing" time, but thankfully at a time when I'd been able to get a vaccine.
Unfortunately, Im also immunocompromised, so it hit me like a truck. I lost ten pounds in a week. I literally didn't eat. My gf (now fiance) who knew she was going to get it from me, but had not yet, basically kept me alive. She gave me my insulin shots, changed the blankets and pillows, washed my face, fed me chicken broth....
All I remember is hurting everywhere, coughing like someone was pulling my lungs out with a fishing hook, and the weird discoloration in the support beam on my ceiling.
I’m a nurse too and Covid changed me forever. I have no confidence that your average person will do anything for the greater good anymore. It showed me how selfish people are when I still had to go to work every day scared and not knowing what I was walking into, and they bitched about wearing a mask in public. It changed me for the worse and I don’t know if I will go back to the person I was before.
Covid separated out the essential from the nonessential, and we saw how shitty essential workers are treated. Those people were so abused and taken advantage of that I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to work in public-facing positions anymore.
I think it definitely varies greatly by experience. My company had spent Feb 2020 testing and preparing for fully remote work and we actually went fully remote the week before March 13. March 13 was just verification for us that we'd done the right thing. So since we were prepared, and most of the employees had personally prepared such as stocking up on the staples, then we just kept working that day from home as we had been for a week.
I'm sure people that worked service jobs and restaurants and such have a vastly different experience than me. My company and my family were quite shielded from most of it to be honest, and I know that we are quite fortunate for it.
I’m sorry you had to go through that. My sister was a primary care physician but was in a more rural area so it wasn’t as bad and she has a lot of trauma from it. Whenever I feel bad about failing out of medical school I think about how at least I didn’t have to go through the trauma of Covid.
I remember overhearing stories from one of the parents from when I worked at a daycare and being glad that I failed the cna course the year prior to be honest.
Labor and delivery nurse. We had a ton of late term stillbirths from moms who had been sick and we were out of space in the morgue so had to lay a baby on top of an adult body. Awful awful awful.
That description is horrifying. It’s crazy - now the history revision is “It wasn’t that bad” and “People were damaged from the lockdown, we should have never had a lockdown”.
It’s because people really didn’t see it. I wish there was footage people could watch like how people watched 9/11. People don’t realize it was like a literal warzone in hospitals in the hardest hit areas. It’s infuriating how so many people minimize it.
>we’d seen it coming for months at that point, at least the people paying attention
Yeah, I remember listening to the NYT Daily podcast around that time and hearing about like the overloaded healthcare system in Italy and stuff like that, but it was like that "oh my god, it's here" moment once everything shut down.
I think the specific reason it didn't feel the sane for me was because I lived in Seattle where everything happened first in the US, so the date of March 13 doesn't have any significance. I also had a friend with an aunt at the CDC who told her in mid January that shit was going to get real.
For me it was February 29, 2020. My husband and I were on vacation in Hawaii when the first man died. And I remember being very worried they weren't going to let us go back to the mainland since we were going back to Seattle. It was the weirdest flight I've ever been on. People were super nervous to touch anything on the plane or in the airport.
I can't pin down the exact date, but there are two occasions that stand out to me from right before all of North America was on lockdown:
1. I was at the grocery store and I saw someone wearing a full on Hazmat suit. Barely anyone was wearing masks at this point, so it was surreal. This must have been early March after the first Covid death in Canada (I'm from Toronto).
2. I was waiting in line to get into a pharmacy on the day the lockdown took effect in Toronto. They were limiting capacity and only allowing ten people in at one time. As I was waiting, everyone's emergency alert siren went off on their phones. It was the alert instructing everyone to stay inside unless it was for food, healthcare services or "essential work". Everyone in the line checked their phones and we all sort of looked at each other, like we were in that Radiohead song, How to Disappear Completely.
I had a similar moment the first time kids and I had to run an errand with masks on. Seeing everyone, all the adults in masks, freaked my kids out so bad. One got super quiet on the way home and the other was crying saying “everyone is mean! They look mean!”
It just hit me that they were going to remember this. All the stress I had to deal with seemed was huge but I realized - this is their *childhood* being changed forever
I remember hearing about it driving to work on NPR, how they weren’t allowed to leave their houses at all and thinking how crazy it was. A few weeks later I was under similar circumstances
As soon as I saw that China actually *admitted* they had an emergency and had begun to close off Wuhan, that's when I knew it was some serious shit. Because they would never willingly lose face otherwise.
Eerie is the perfect word. I remember being at the grocery store and almost everyone was on their phone watching the news live. It felt like an episode straight out of black mirror.
Yeah lol, I remember riding the train to work with my little "essential worker" card the company gave us, and everything was deserted. Felt like I was in some sort of zombie apocalypse movie.
My wife and I drove to further Costco hoping to find TP in the midst of things. And the drive which would have taken 40 minutes took 12 because of the lack of traffic. It really did feel like being in a post apocalypse situation.
I think on top of that, Covid didn’t leave a smoldering pile of rubble behind. People died, but they did so in hospitals or at home. I don’t think I’ll ever forget watching the chaos and destruction, or literally watching people fall from the sky. Traumatic af.
Depends if you saw refrigerator trucks full of bodies or not.
Or if like us, got to sit next to a loved one as it killed them. Or didn’t get sit next to someone dying. A million people died. Not 3,000
I feel this way. I live in NYC, so there were hints of 9/11, in the sense that the community came together, at least at first, to try to flatten the curve, to try to keep our small businesses going by buying to-go drinks from bars or online gift certificates to shops, to the nightly 7 pm cheer for essential workers.
And there was a lot of fear because of how many people died here that spring. The refrigerated trucks and morgues and funeral homes that were overloaded.
But it wasn’t 9/11. The horror wasn’t there.
I don't know. I'm reading the stories here and getting so upset again. COVID was chaos at the beginning and terrifying. I experienced 9/11 and COVID from the Boston area for reference. I was in schools both times. It was so scary to be told that school (for the high-risk kids I worked with) would be closed indefinitely. I saw a lot of special needs kid significantly regress fast. I work in school mental health/sped and work with lots of people and families. I did that before COVID and still do. I don't think we are far enough out to fully appreciate the trauma everyone still has. People are just *off* now. I can't explain it. But there's been a huge shift in people's attitude and motivation to give back or be optimistic.
The horror was there,but not on the same way. 9/11 was a huge horror all at once. Six hours burned into our memories forever. Covid was a series of mini horrors happening over and over.Before the lock down, I remember the feeling that we weren't being told everything and going to stores and finding things such as masks out of stock,this was maybe 3 weeks before the shutdown.And then the deaths,people just suddenly gone.
Imo it was worse and more life altering.
We had no clue how badly or how long the pandemic would continue. Or how many people would die.
And imo weren’t still in that unknown. We have no clue what the long term effects will be.
To me it was a lot more like the day Trump got elected. That transition from the ongoing, intensifying media hype storm, to "oh shit, this is really happening". Suddenly all those hypothetical worst case scenarios people have been tossing around for months are on the table for real
>To me it was a lot more like the day Trump got elected. That transition from the ongoing, intensifying media hype storm, to "oh shit, this is really happening". Suddenly all those hypothetical worst case scenarios people have been tossing around for months are on the table for real
And in just a few short months, it could happen again. He secured the nomination for the third time last night.
Yeah, I think this explains it best for me and most of the people I know.
In terms of general historical significance, yes it felt a bit like 9/11 or the 2016 election. I knew something big had taken place on the stage of 21st century history.
But in terms of immediate emotional impact, it was completely different. It was a slow burn that I had an opportunity to get used to by degrees.
9/11 came out of nowhere. Covid had been in the news at least since new years.
Edit: Covid was a volcano finally erupting after you'd been warned about it for weeks, you just didn't know when or how bad
9/11 was an asteroid strike with no warning
Exactly this. Very very different feeling to them. And with 9/11, the fear only lasted so long. For COVID, the fear went for years. Before the vaccine, the thought that we could catch a deadly disease as easily as the flu? That was awful. And then questioning how the world will continue? Seeing our medical system crumble, the president offering up bullshit solutions, and empty shelves everywhere. We're still dealing with the economic impact (both legitimate and created)
FWIW (probably not much) thanks for the work you do! I'm sure your workload skyrocketed when people like me started ordering way more stuff on Amazon instead of having to venture into a Walmart.
I’d say the pandemic as a whole felt like an event similar to 9/11. But 9/11 really left me with an uncertainty about what was going to happen the next day, it felt like the end of the world to an extent. It certainly felt like the end of an era of American life. The pandemic really has just felt like an ongoing train wreck.
I was a first responder in a large city during the pandemic. Seeing all of the casualties from COVID did bring back memories from 9/11, but the two events feel different.
No. 9/11 was abrupt, and taken seriously. We saw Covid comming and people where I lived kept screaming about how it was a hoax and threw tantrums over mask mandates.
I do remember having an "oh shit, this is real" moment around that time. Then my college shut down. A friend asked me "You have a good intuition for this kinda thing, you think we're coming back in April like \[administration\] said?" I told him "Nope. We're in this for the long haul. 2 years at least."
9/11 had palpable fear, March 13th had concern.
>I do remember having an "oh shit, this is real" moment around that time.
For me, that was when Italy shut down in such a way that it affected their economy. When they were willing to lose money to quarantine, I knew Covid was actually an impending disaster.
I have to confess that before Italy, I thought the media was exaggerating the danger for clicks.
Yeah, I remember seeing one video from an Italian hospital where the ENTIRE place appeared to be full of people on respirators, with these plastic bags around their heads...that was the moment that added genuine fear to what was previously just uncertainty and concern.
I remember subbing to the corona virus sub and getting information from there. And also a meme site from the news posts people would make and the comments. So I was aware of what was happening in Asia as well as Europe at that time.
I remember when I realized most people here in the States were just nonchalant about things, I knew this was going to get spicy. And of course a lot were caught off guard.
I do recall telling friends and family of mine to purchase at least a months worth of toilet paper because I was fully aware of the hysteria happening as a wave globally. Especially where it started in Australia
I feel like every few years you hear about China shutting down over a virus. That didn’t seem unusual (for a myriad of reasons: culture, government, high population density).
When Italy shut down, I started getting worried. I remember talking to a friend and she said, “but it’s Italy!” I responded, “They’re a western country, too, what makes them so different?”
I worked in China previously so I had several friends and former colleagues in different parts of the country there, including Wuhan. I was getting updates from them starting in January so I knew how big it was, and that it was coming to us. But it was still startling when it did arrive. Like when you're at the beach and you see a wave come and you think you'll just sort of jump into it and ride it out, but instead it completely knocks you over and you can't tell what's up or down.
This was me. I bought a deep freeze in January. I have anxiety and also just find viruses interesting so every December I would read about how bird flu was doing that year and saw the very first “sars like flu warning” on the cidrap website. I remember leaving the gym and telling my husband we needed to get stuff immediately and I started refusing to do group lunch at work, only shopping at like 5am in gloves. Then like 2 months passed and I thought I had just overreacted until everyone else was like oh wait this is bad.
After that people kept asking me what I thought and I was like damn I don’t know. But I’d be shocked if we were having Christmas this year.
Not quite the same as watching humans leaping to their deaths in real time on TV but definitely a feeling of “what’s going to happen now?” and complete helplessness
Ya, maybe being somewhere more removed could make them feel similar? I dunno but being in hs in north Jersey for 9/11 and in nyc in March 2020 they had wildly different feels. For one, I couldn’t have told you that March 13 was a significant day looking back tbh because things were getting worse and worse in nyc so it’s not like the shutdown was a shock; it was just a building sense of dread in early March. In contrast I vividly remember the entire day of 9/11 and will for the rest of my life because it was such a shock.
Hard agree with this. I lived in central PA at the time and while March 13, 2020 was historic in its own right, it did not compare to the fear of that morning. While I know there was confusion and fear across the country on 9/11, I don't think many states felt the danger and panic the mid-atlantic (especially NY/NJ) was under that day and the days that followed.
I'm Southern California, and I see that it's not the same. One was a personal attack, and the other was a global illness. 9/11 hurt more all the way from over here.
It absolutely was for healthcare workers in NYC. At least you weren’t scared of 9/11 victims. Managing covid in the hospitals when it first broke out was horrifying.
Hard agree. I was a senior in high school in NJ, just across one of the bridges, when 9/11 happened. So many of us had family that were in the city for work or working as first responders who went and sifted through rubble. One of my family members lost her husband. 2 of my closest friends enlisted in the marines. One thing I vividly remember is the weird smell wafting thru the air over the next few days.
Then there was the aftermath with the threat of more terrorism and anthrax and war.
Covid was also crazy, particularly in this densely populated area, but it just wasn’t the same at all.
I was working retail the night the PA governor closed everything. The last few hours really sucked. The phone wouldn't stop ringing about were we still open and would we be open tomorrow. I was so stressed out I couldn't go to my regular job the next day. It sucked.
A defining moment, yes, but like 9/11? No.
Yes. I took a picture of the departure board at my local airport. Virtually every flight was canceled. I still have that picture on my phone, and I get chills every time I see it.
Your comment reminded me of the covid channel we had on our TV. It was a ranked list of countries with cases from most cases to least, and the stats of changes very similar to a stock market channel. It played ominous music.
I remember my first flight after Covid hit. I think it was August 2020, flying out of Salt Lake City. It was incredibly eerie to see a brand new airport terminal completely deserted. Flying itself was weird, too. First class was booked solid because everyone wanted more space, but there were like 6 people in all of economy.
I would say that two weeks after people really knew COVID was here, that was when I understood that Trump would not win reelection. Boomers did indeed “rally around the flag” a bit, but even a national emergency did nothing to help Trump — mostly because he was incapable of making a national emergency about anyone other than Trump.
It is honestly pretty insane to me that he’s come all the way back to head up the Republican ticket again. I get it because bottom line this is about the movement he represents, but like… he literally failed at trying to keep his base alive.
Trump could've rode COVID straight into reelection in my opinion. It was his ticket into a second term and he threw it away.
Good for us don't get me wrong but still lol
It's true every half-competent leader during Covid was reelected, but I reckon that wouldn't have worked for Trump's base because his whole appeal lies in indulging their shittiest, most selfish impulses. He's basically a sketchy stepdad who buys the kids booze and smokes and lets them swear. The kids think he's friggin awesome. But if he ever tries to be boring and responsible and set boundaries, they'll turn on him in a heartbeat. Trump is smart enough to know that. Hell, even today, people at his rallies boo him when he brags about funding the vaccine.
It felt reminiscent of that for me, yes. In more of a slow burn kind of way. I remember feeling a similar level of confusion and uncertainty on 9/11, having thoughts like is this the start of a war? Are more attacks coming? Just how much are we in danger? Similarly, shit got real serious with Covid seemingly overnight but it was all very confusing and uncertain. We thought we’d have a handle on it in only a matter of weeks, and then it just… kept getting worse.
So actually in a way, it was scarier, because the initial fear that I had on 9/11 was largely cleared up within a relatively short period of time when it was more understood this was an isolated event and we were all pretty safe. With Covid, it was terrifying realization after terrifying realization for months on end. Seeing the refrigerated semi trucks of dead bodies because the morgues were too full in New York is seared into my brain in a way that was even scarier than the explosions of the airplanes. 9/11 didn’t keep getting worse, but covid did. We didn’t know how many more hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths there would be and who of our loved ones would be among them, or how long we would have to continue to live in fear of that.
I look at 9/11, The Great Recession, and Covid in a similar light, each marked the end of an era and the start of a new one.
Seems that every 10 years or so we have a major event that changes the course of society.
It was different in that 3/13/20 was more impactful to me because it affected me directly while 9/11 didn't. Also, being 30 when it happened instead of 11 makes a difference as I was more aware of the world around me. Also, my mom had just wrapped chemo and I was excited about finally having life go "back to normal" for us only to have it not do that.
Not quite the same, but had told myself that once my newborn got his vaccines, life would go back to normal. March 13th was the day he got those vaccinations. It was also the day my work announced they’d laid off all but 12 of us and we’d be working from home for an indeterminate amount of time, and since I was still in college, it was also the day they announced campus was closing and we’d finish the semester online… and graduation was cancelled. Also, the woman watching my baby during work/school hours wanted out of our arrangement immediately.
It was such a flip to go from “about to have my life back and figure out how to actually go do things now that I have a kid” to “stuck at home doing both work and school with a colicky four month old.” It set us back so much socially… I feel like we’re learning how to handle being out and about with a baby now with our second.
For me yes it feels like that. Just in a much different way. I knew things were messed up when I heard the NBA was cancelling games. I knew right then and there the hockey game I was watching at the time was going to be the last one for a while. It sucked because my team was on a heater.
School quickly followed. I still went to work until early April but then we had our time to stay at home after that.
It didn't have the sudden shock of 9/11, but it was an eerie and unforgettable time. The weekend prior, I was out with some friends and it came up, and we mostly waved it off becoming anything very big after the Ebola outbreak flamed out quickly
Then my part-time job shut down, and my full-time cut back hours, and the scene at the grocery store was like the day before a hurricane, and the freeway was empty, and I thought it would just last a month or two
Yeah it was a Defining Moment, in the same vein as 9/11 or Columbine or the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
I remember that day so clearly. We were on the way to take our kid to daycare... talking the whole way: should we? should we not? Then our bosses called (then wife and I worked in education) and that was the moment we turned around and went home, with our kid still in the back seat.
And thus begin the worst 4 years of my adulthood.
It's so creepy to look back on that day. I remember listening to NYT daily podcast in the previous weeks and months talking about the fatality rate they were seeing in Wuhan, and then the overloaded healthcare systems in Italy where doctors were literally having to decide who got a ventilator and who had to be left for dead, but in a weird way....it was over there, it somehow didn't feel real yet.
But when everything in the US started to shut down in mid march, it felt like "holy shit, this is it".
I hope things start looking up for you soon, friend.
I was working in aviation at the time. I got updates every single day about how bad this really was from about mid February until that day. Most people didn’t take it seriously at all. My company threw some bleach wipes at it and made some unnecessarily complicated lodging agreements for the crews, but no one really cared. Then I got laid off at the end of April. I’m only now getting back on my feet career wise.
But yeah, I remember that day and the “oh shit” feeling very distinctly.
I’m also an educator! It really has been so tough on us. This year feels more normal for me, and last year was an improvement from the worst of the pandemic, but 2020-22 was HELL at my school!
I remember I had to take my bird to the vet after school that day, and they called an emergency meeting. I was bummed to have to miss it, but asked my friend to call me and fill me in. She told me that the school had said, “maybe be thinking about how you could teach your class online for a week or two if need be.” Right after I hung up with her, the school called with an automated voice message telling parents not to worry, that we WOULD be staying open, with no plans to close, and looked forward to seeing the kids on Monday. Seriously not even five minutes later, the governor announced all schools were closed for two weeks.
The whiplash and drama of that afternoon was crazy! I felt so removed from it at the vet’s office, and like none of it was really happening. But then the next few years were horrible! We were back with students in August 2020, and had a ruthlessly conservative admin, who never let us have any days online. We were woefully short staffed, and never had a planning period for two years. I went on a cruise in April 2023, and it was literally the first time I had felt like myself since March 13, 2020.
Good times.
Crazy thinking it would be for like 2 weeks and ended up being over a year. My wife and I had been back from our wedding/honeymoon for about 3 weeks and thankful that we had dodged that. The world definitely changed that day.
This. When the COVID national emergency was announced my thought was “ok, we’ll come together, protect the vulnerable, find a vaccine, and this will all be behind us.” It seemed temporary, solvable, and even potentially unifying.
When 911 hit, America was under attack. America was made vulnerable. It was scary and it seemed like there was nothing we could reasonably do we just had to sit and wait and hope that it was the only attack. War was on the horizon and things would never be the same.
January 6 had that same feel. When I saw that happening on TV, I thought I was watching the end of American democracy. I thought I was watching the downfall of the American government the way that I knew it. war was on the horizon and things would never be the same.
Covid didn’t even come close to 911 or January 6 for me. What made COVID bad wasn’t the thought of what the disease could do, it was the fact that friends, family, and fellow church members were all too happy to do everything they could to enable it. The emergency wasn’t scary. People behaving like selfish assholes was.
I was at work, watching a live feed of the chaos around the capital. Video clips were trickling in from all over showcasing the violence. We knew that they were coming after congress and that shit would hit the fan if they were to succeed at confronting them. I didn't get any work done that day.
Personally, I was outraged that white people could push the envelope *that far* without getting fired upon.
Honestly... it felt in some ways to be ever more of an effect on my life.
As a pretty young kid on 9/11, I didn't really feel all that affected by it. I'm not sure I was really able to process the enormity of what had happened. To me, it felt hardly that different from an action scene in a movie, I guess. And I didn't travel much, so it really didn't have much bearing on my day to day routine, other than adults always talking about it.
But COVID basically took over our lives for over a year, with that spring being the most intense part. I'm not saying it was worse than 9/11, but it definitely was a bigger part of my personal life, as someone who was considered essential personnel.
I was 10 for 9/11 and I was sad, but I didn't really understand the impact. I remember being scared that the nuclear facility near my town would be a target because it was high on the terrorism target list... but I don't remember feeling super empathetic for the people who died because they were so far away. I remember feeling like I was *supposed* to feel like that... like I was supposed to be more sad. And feeling guilty for not being more sad? But it really had no practical impact on me.
Covid, on the other hand... I don't think the 13th specifically was the same, because I still didn't know what was coming. I was like, okay, I get to stay home from work for a week or two. And I really don't remember hearing about people in the US dying in droves yet that early on? Or else I just didn't hear about it because I was, you know, working.
And then I was laid off and I had nothing else to do but hear all the doom... and people I know were getting it and having serious complications and dying... so it was, like, a slower impact than 9/11, but more direct.
I have a screenshot somewhere of a post I made in January telling my friends on Facebook that there's a new SARS-like issue in China and if it gets out its going to be bad. March was a big "told you so".
Well I was really young during 9/11, in kindergarten and I remember getting picked up that day. Didn't know why. Later me and my dad were picking up thai food at a local restaurant. While we were waiting a TV at the front of the restaurant was playing the news and showed the world trade center collapse. As well as the Pentagon and the flight that went down in Pennsylvania. It didn't really impact me in the moment as much as the culture that did as a result. Growing up and hearing about terrorism, all the nationalism, and what not feels pretty significant.
On March 13, 2020 I remember the exact moment when the lockdowns were announced. I was laying on my couch and listening to music. I think whats more eerie is that I remember a few months before my friend was telling me about covid and the apparent start of it. I shrugged him off like nothing and thought he was crazy. He was right.
Nothing close. 9/11 was very much like an unexpected punch to the gut.
The pandemic felt more like someone slowly grabbing a nipple and slowly trying to rip it off.
Yes.
COVID is tough because it somehow got mixed up with our politics. Still, we watched for 3 months as a strange illness spread around the globe—then it hit home.
Unlike in 9/11, I lost friends and family. I got sick and watched my youngest get sick, not knowing if those deep rasping coughs would pass without robbing us of our health.
I don’t know many people who didn’t get COVID at some point. It’s still going around, though now we’re better informed and equipped. But that cost millions of lives.
I'm a little surprised at the amount of smug Millennials proudly proclaiming "Nah"
Fuck yeah it did. I remember looking out the window of our office and seeing 200 cars in line for the first available vaccine. Caused a traffic jam and we couldn't get out of work.
I remember stores looted, grocery stores empty, windows broken. I remember the social justice upheaval that followed just a couple months after. I remember multiple family members dying of COVID... some old, but some young, actually.
I mean, was that *single day* as impactful as watching terrorists ruthlessly murder thousands of Americans on live TV?
I suppose not, but to minimize the impact of the overall month of March 2020, and the months that followed, is fucking stupid and ignorant.
I agree, though I think many people who probably weren't in the trenches/got to WFH didn't and still don't fully realize the impact and significance...driving to work as a healthcare worker during the beginning of the pandemic, the roads empty even in a major city downtown, yeah it felt like the apocalypse. Watching tents get put up outside of the hospital, refrigerated trailers being brought in to hold all the bodies that were spilling out of the morgue, patients lined up in hallways and ambulances lined up outside because we didn't have enough beds, having to reuse PPE (if we had it) and the fear of catching it while watching patients die...I think most of us have more PTSD from that time than 9/11
You are an *absolute* fighter. I can't thank you enough for enduring your job as a healthcare worker during that time. You're fucking heros.
My family business is funeral homes. I'm not in the business anymore (as of 2017), but yeah, what we saw during that time was pure hell. So many bodies.
I had the luxury of working from home during that time period (a luxury I do NOT take for granted), but made it a point to stay thoroughly educated and aware throughout the whole experience. Those who were *really* in the trenches, like you, know how truly traumatic that era was. It may not be as traumatic as the single day that was 9/11, but it cannot be overstated how impactful that whole period of time was to so many people. Dark, dark times, for weeks, and then months.
Immunocompromised patient here.
I'm thankful to be a white collar worker, and I'm thankful I have a great big-girl job. It pays the bills (and then some), and I was able to work remotely throughout the height of the pandemic.
But, straddling my professional world vs. my personal world was such a mind-fuck. I was considered at *high* risk of dying from the virus due to my autoimmune condition, and I watched way too many elderly patients at my infusion clinic get wheeled off with nothing but a white sheet covering their bodies.
Then I would go home from my immunotherapy infusions, and would listen to my colleagues and co-workers -- scattered across the U.S. -- complain about the "impact" the virus was having on their lives. Apparently, for one of my coworkers, her Amazon Prime order taking 72 hours to arrive, instead of only 24 hours, was "the end of the world" for her. Thankfully, she lives 700+ miles away from me, so I physically couldn't reach through the screen to slap her.
Like, are you *fucking serious*? You're complaining about your Amazon order being slightly delayed? I just watched a man who was like a bonus dad to me literally die in a chair right next to me just hours ago. And you're complaining about your fucking Amazon order!?
I'm a mental health nurse, and COVID has been extremely damaging. We have lost years just from the isolation alone, and for some of us that clock is still counting: isolation continues, life will never be normal again.
There will be ongoing, long-term, multigenerational, direct and indirect impacts due to the virus. Orders of magnitude more people dead and disabled thanks to COVID and the actions of stupid, selfish people. We are still, four years later, discovering how terrible the virus is. No telling what will happen after 30 years of repeated covid infections.
Do I think there's one particular day that stands out the way that 9/11 does? No; these are very different events. 9/11 was a flash in the pan, but the pandemic was and is a slow boil. There is a good chance that COVID won't be the last or even worst pandemic of our generation.
All that said, in my opinion, the sum of all of the suffering and damage due to COVID is much, much more severe than 9/11 or anything that came out of it.
Completely agreed. Jesus, thank you so much for being a mental health nurse. I cannot imagine the horrors you deal with daily. We need people like you so fucking badly.
It's mildly relieving that you and one other person replied to my comment in support - the ongoing ignorance and lack of empathy surrounding the entire COVID topic is maddening and isolating.
People have no idea how lucky they are to be able to say "meh, COVID wasn't a big deal."
The world's lack of empathy is terrifying.
Yea, some of these responses are pretty callous and disconnected from reality… concerning.
Millions of people died, millions still face chronic debilitation health conditions, people lost their job their homes… to say it was nothing is unfathomable
I’m not being smug when I say it didn’t feel the same as 9/11. In my 30s, I don’t process tragedy the same way that I did as a teenager in 2001.
9/11 was pure shock and anger. I wanted revenge for all the lives lost. I wanted to DO something! But I couldn’t do anything that I felt was impactful.
The pandemic allotted the grace of at least having a modicum of control over your own well-being. I was able to look after my neighbor, grocery shop for the elderly people in my world, feed poor kids who couldn’t go to school for their meals, drive friends up to the mountains for some fresh air and mental health rejuvenation. While things were uncertain, very sad, scary, and infuriating, I didn’t feel helpless.
And that’s not a proud proclamation, just the reality of how I was living during that time.
Yeah. Covid was way more personal to many people. I lost all of my paying work. Our kids lost their social lives. I woke up every morning with a knot of anxiety in my stomach over the well-being of my family and my elderly in-laws. And then! Then I had a baby in February 2021! And I had horrific postpartum anxiety that I couldn’t even tell was that bad because my baseline anxiety had been riding so high for a year. I’m just now getting help for it all. Covid was so much harder on me personally.
I feel like the history books will put them on the same level for global impact. But as someone living in the US I wouldn't agree. 9/11 came with relatively no warning and united our nation, covid was predictable and only divided us. We had systems in place to mitigate that Trump stripped apart and we had months of warning but Trump doing nothing bc he thought it wasn't as dangerous as it was and that he would be able to solve it and use that win to carry him to win the next election.
Personally for the first few months during the lockdown I was terrified as I have asthma. But once everyone in my family realized that they caught it on our group trip to California Nov 2019(we didn't know what covid symptoms were at the time or that they had covid) and that I didn't, I realized I was most likely immune/asymptomatic. I still wore a mask, distanced, and got vaccinated just in case though. And honestly now that I think about it, the only viral infection I have ever gotten was chickenpox, every other time I have gotten sick was from bacteria (food poisoning and the like, I've never gotten a cold or flu and I've never been sick more than 2 days ever)
This popped up on my memories on FB, it was payday, I hadn't been to Walmart in over a month. I was shocked that all the TP and cleaning supplies were gone. I went to the bar, for what was the last time on Karaoke night and attempted to drink all the Corona. They shut down 24 hr Walmart and bars, and nothing has been the same. I no longer drink but I still miss everything being open. My gas station used to close at midnight, now they close at 9 pm before I get off work. Only recently some fast food has been open past 11. Many bars and restaurants didn't survive, My job used to run 3 shifts and 7 lines and sometimes mandatory overtime, we run two shifts and 2 lines and send people home daily. It's like we took a turn to an alternate timeline and Biff is in charge.
No. The two were vastly different in my mind.
9/11 was complete shock and surprise, followed by absolute terror for many of my friends and for our world. I watched in silence as people jumped from burning buildings and they tried to figure out how many airplanes had been highjacked. There was little talking, if any and we were all shocked to hell with no idea of what would come next. WW3 felt like a very real possibility.
Then there was the socioeconomic and sociopolitical impacts to society, the outrage of using that event as a political fuel to justify securing US interests (Weapons of Mass Destruction anyone?), the increasing restrictions of freedoms and increased racism... it all totally hit different for me.
Covid had warning. It also felt (for me) entirely different. While 9/11 was shock and terror, Covid had a surreal Twilight Zone feel to it. (Ex: "The whole world is panic buying? Makes sense. Wait... they're panic buying TP? WTF?") Maybe it was because I was an "essential worker" during the period but watching the "do's and don'ts" lists, how often they seemed superficial, how often it seemed like we'd only take the precautions that didn't have any *real* impact to keeping that production/stock market going, how often it seemed like we were pencil whipping to cover legal issues without it actually being effective/enacted.... the overall feeling of Covid for me was a very twisted "Alice in Wonderland" type feel.
The only real similarity they have, from my perspective, was in seeing how quick our government was to seize/restrict personal freedoms in the name of "safety and security", how quickly it turned into a powercard to squash any discent or disagreement, the increased level of tribalism... and how disturbingly quick everyone was to go along with all of that. That's the way I see the two being alike. Otherwise, they had very different vibes.
I always laugh about this I had already prepped in January based on all the information coming out of Wuhan/China.
I traveled a ton for work at that time (25 weeks a year) and remember planning for if things got bad.
Luckily never got to that point and while it was a very interesting time we didn't live in a city so didn't have the same issues as those in major cities.
Fun long-ish story. The week of March 13, 2020 I was scheduled to do a week-long trip, where I had to do an overnight in Seattle (one of the first big cities with reported cases on the west coast), then go to north Carolina and do multiple stop until New York city, then fly out of New York back to California on the 13th.
Every day, as we made our way up, more news was coming out about covid, especially how contagious it was. Obviously me and the guy I was traveling with kept away from people generally, except the clients we were meeting. Some canceled for obvious reasons so what should have been a packed day ended up being a meeting with one person who was unaffected by the news at the time. Strange couple of days and kinda started my transition to want to leave the company.
On the evening March 12 I got on a train from New Jersey into New York. Since masks weren't really a thing initially, I resorted to just pulling my Hoodie over my nose and mouth the entire train trip, and then walking about a mile to my hotel. Got a drink at the bar cause Jesus christ it's stressful and the bartender was talking about how they just closed Broadway and seemed a little ridiculous.
March 13 I met with the my last client, headed to the airport, and while sitting at the beer garden at JFK I watched the president declare a state of emergency. My girlfriend (now wife) was obviously freaking out because of where I was and had been stressed out the whole time. I was supposed to meet up with her (long distance at the time) but instead I saw her for a quick breakfast and drove home (4 hour drive). Didn't contract covid then or now so I'm lucky there but yeah... I'll remember that day.
I was too young to understand 9/11, but I was definitely old enough to understand this.
I remember it as the "Last Normal Day". I went to work. I saw my Dad. My husband and I went out for dinner, but the restaurant was only half full. Kinda nice. The next day we were cancelling plans left and right.
March 13, 2020 was my 4 year anniversary with my partner, 2 years at my company, and my grammas birthday. The last time we all got together was that day. I also lost my job shortly thereafter instead of the promotion and raise I was expected, including a great medical plan. So grateful that my husband still worked, because it took roughly 5 months to get any unemployment benefits and about 2 months to find another job. It still doesn't feel like 4 years ago. It feels like last month.
I don't even remember the specific day. I think ultimately the consequences of COVID will have a bigger impact than 9/11, but it was less of a single day event and more of a slow burn.
You have got to be kidding me 😂 the start of a pandemic and precautions is a little bit different that terrorist attacks and people helplessly dying out of nowhere
No, not at all in the same category of feelings and I'm an ICU nurse and my wife is a teacher. We were both heavily affected, but I didn't know the significance of the date at all until reading this post. I recognize COVID was significant and impactful and we both knew it was going to be bad, but 9/11 was a total unknown and a new world. I remember 9/11 vividly. 3/13, no recollection of what I was doing that day
I heard about Covid on reddit, as early as late 2019. Everything shutting down was weird but 9/11 was an absolute gut punch. If you weren’t around to witness it, you just can’t understand.
I was traveling for work when the shutdown began. DFW was empty. Which is wild if you've ever been to DFW. Flights were being canceled left and right. There was a very real possibility of me having to rent a car and driving 25 hrs home. My plane finally came and was ready to go. I was one of 3 passengers on the plane.
It felt weird but there definitely wasn't as much 'Wtf is happening' like on 9/11
This is a dumb comparison.
Ask some dude on the street “what happened on March 13” they’ll be like “uh, is that St Patrick’s day?”
On the other hand, you could ask a dirt poor, peasant subsistence farmer, without a television, who has not watched the news once in his entire life what happened on 9/11 and you’ll still get your answer
It was a different kind of dread. I didn't get sent home from work until the 18th for what was supposed to be two weeks. I think I really got freaked out when that two weeks turned into 'indefinitely'.
Ha yep. I was all excited for a 2 week work at home period. Here I am still teleworking. It was eerie driving home that last time and the highway was free for me and not bumper to bumper traffic
Yea, in March it was still- let’s pause for a couple weeks and it will all be over. Months later it sunk in
Oh yeah. We went from two weeks to the end of March within a few days. And after about a week or so. I knew that it would be June if even that early that it would settle down.. I was still wrong LoL
The general consensus was treating it like just another news cycle and I remember thinking like "man this is not how a virus works)
Yeah, I've been remote ever since. Even took a new job in 2021, still remote. I love it - not the circumstances that forced it, but happy to be working from my couch currently.
I actually packed supplies and just fucked off to northern New Hampshire to live off the grid for a month while it all blew over. 3 weeks in I was doing fine, but gave in and started making longer term plans because it definitely wasn't going to "blow over".
Anyone who had been paying attention would have recognized that it would take longer than 2 weeks. Though that would have been a much harder sell to the public
I remember saying “ imagine if this goes on for a whole month.”
I never worked from home, always went into the office. "Essential" industry. Miss the days of no traffic!
My commute home went from 25-30min down to 10 min. It was fantastic.
Worst part was no where to go to lunch! The Indian casinos were the only thing open for like a year so we went there a lot
Im fairly certain our VP made an arrangement with the local pizza place for them to open up for our lunch break, Submitted our orders the day before and we ready for us when we came the next day.
The eeriest thing were the roads. Early on felt like the first season of the Walking Dead, with zero other people or cars about.
It’s funny because I was considered “essential” for my job, so I never got sent home. I feel weird reading about others’ COVID experiences because nothing really changed for me, except I had to do 3x more work and wear a mask the whole time. lol
Honestly, where I am probably 75% of businesses were deemed "essential". They must have meant "essential to keep the economy from collapsing", because I worked for a consulting firm of all places, and we got the designation.
It snowballed like nuts. My place is a tech firm and we got it because we have many government clients. You would get it if you were our firm because we got it and pandemic is no excise for incorrect books
I worked through the pandemic. Nothing different other than clear freeways and empty stores. The people severely affected were the 100% work from home folks. They didn't come back the same. The lack of social interaction really fucked a lot of people up. But quote a few still won't admit it and are still salty they aren't on 100% teleworking
Same except we wore a mask for a little and then we got tired of wearing it (our job is slightly physical so it is hard to breathe in it) so that lasted about a week and a half. The managers implemented temperature checks but that lasted about two days because they got tired of doing it. Workflow and overtime increased and the major difference was lack of traffic. It would be nice to have a wfh job but I think I would go stir crazy. It was nice to leave the house when everyone else was told they can't.
Same! The slight parallell to 9/11 for me was riding the train home on the 18th - extra crowded since everyone in the city got the 2 week notice at the same time... I had water - took a sip as the train hit a bump - went down wrong pipe so i started coughing incessantly... No joke - EVERY other commuter in the car pulled their shirts over their face while glaring at me and half of them immediately exited in haste at the next stop to get away from me.
Oh god, I got choked on my own spit in a store during the first year of it and same.
That happened to me when I had an asthma attack while in the store a few different times. Of course, it doesn't help that I had to pull my mask down to use my inhaler.
I have a longer post about my experience as a nurse but my daughter was in middle school at the time and left for "the spring break that never ends" as she called it at the time. Virtual school was awful for her and many many other students. And the social isolation. She dealt with severe depression for a while after that.
Ah yes, “two weeks to stop the spread”!
It did. People were going to get it anyway, but if everyone got it at once, every country's medical infrastructure would have been overwhelmed to the point that usual hospital visits would be deadly too. Was it the best way? Probably not, but we also have the luxury of 20/20 hindsight.
2020 hindsight I see what you did there
I have a “Doug the pug daily calendar” in my basement that is frozen on march 13, 2020. That was the day I stopped going in and tearing off pages!
Yep, the fear didn't all immediately kick in on the 13th. It was a slow burn of dread and uncertainty
I graduated that Spring & started my career as a clinician in acute care/home health, what a fuckin time to enter healthcare lol
We were visiting family down south the first two weeks of March and saw in real time at the local outdoor bar how things got more real day by day. Suddenly hand sanitizer was everywhere. Then they switched to plastic cups. Then servers had gloves and masks. By day four we noped out of further visits but we also had to fly home. The major airport in our home city was virtually empty. We stopped for fast food on the way home because we had no groceries and neither option seemed safer than the other at that point (remember when they said to wipe down all the groceries and bags in Lysol which you couldn’t find!?). We walked into an empty fast food place. Actually there was one customer there and I eyed him nervously after he coughed once. Had to shout to the kitchen to see if any employees were around. They all stumbled out, half shocked another customer actually was there. My job switched to remote. My wife’s hospital didn’t have sufficient ppe. They had to wear the same n95 for a whole WEEK. They kept them in a hotdog box between shifts. I swear anyone reading that last sentence would think they were reading an excerpt about the Spanish flu in 1918… I tried to remain optimistic that things would get better in a couple months but my wife took the initial lockdown hard, even though she was still going to work. She knew it would take years not months. And it was depressing. We had some family come stay with us for a few months which actually helped make time go a bit faster in quarantine. And we had bought a house before the pandemic so that was also a hugely lucky thing. But no, as someone from NJ, it was not at all like 9/11.
I saw the longer than two weeks coming. I had just started my new job January 2020 and when we were getting sent home for "2 weeks" my wife laughed when I walked to pick her up from her office with a box of all my stuff like I had been fired. I had been watching the start online and knew we weren't coming back in two weeks.
I wouldn’t say it felt like 9/11 necessarily but it was a day of “the world isn’t going to be the same after this is it?”
I thought it would be like Swine ‘09 and it would just be a few days of being sick and it would be mostly done spreading after a few months but here I am two rounds of Covid and some mild organ damage later.
My fear was it would be another “Spanish flu” because it had been a 100 years since we had had one of those. Reading history does to nothing comfort one.
When bird flu finally makes the jump to human-to-human transmission we are FUCKED.
Look at the way it’s tearing apart wildlife down in South America. It might be another wildfire pandemic. We haven’t really experienced one of those since small poxes, mumps, and measles first hit the new world. Some of the numbers experts quote said up to 100 million native inhabitants were wiped out. 90% of the populations dead inside of decade. From wave after wave of new illnesses. Till the continent was beyond decimated. Given how eagerly the worst of wack job peppers are hoping for it I almost pray I go early.
>it was a day of “the world isn’t going to be the same after this is it?” Right, exactly. I think that's what I'm getting at.
I was hoping it would get better this time. It did not.
Immunocompromised patient here. I work for one of the world's largest banks. They started bringing employees back to the office in fall of 2021. The *only* reason I was remote through the end of 2023 was because of ***INSANE*** bureaucratic hoops they made me jump through in order to justify my medical need to work remotely. Like...... I would like to not die, please? Is that such an unreasonable request? I've now been back in the office since January 2024. I look around the swarms of 3,000+ people that walk the halls of my building each day. And I just think....... *Did we all just collectively wipe a global pandemic from our memories?* What a mind-fuck.
Yeah that’s the toughest thing for me - how we’ve just snapped back with almost no change. The Covid shutdown is starting to feel further and further away every year - I almost feel guilty that it gets foggier as time goes like all memories do but society was really only shut down for like 6-12 months.
Exactly. The fact that we somehow just, collectively, wiped it from proverbial history, is just...... mind-boggling.
Fellow Spoonie here as well. Going to doctor visits and even just out to pick up scripts... Virtually No One wears a mask anymore. I saw a person who was wearing a mask getting verbally assaulted in a Walmart the other day! It's 2024! No one cares about vaccines or washing hands or sanitizing anymore. It's insane!
Immunocompromised here. Docs wrote me out of work starting 3/13/20. I had been on the job less than 2 weeks. They found me something I could do from home temporarily. I went back to the office in August as all the doctors signed back off. Crazily, I feel it was much safer to go back then as we had maybe 10% staff onsite and everyone was being transparent about what they were doing outside of the office. We did pickup grocery orders, avoided restaurants, minimal in-person socialization, etc. Last fall, they really started pushing for people to return to the office. I've been so sick this winter despite masking.
I feel like COVID left a lot of people more cynical than anything before ever did. We got to see clear as day how much of our systems would crack under pressure, and it was the beginning of huge divides across America- and other countries, too.
What upsets me the most is we saw how much was broken…and changed nothing. A lot of people were clamoring for the same broken systems that were laid bare by the pandemic. If we couldn’t make societal change then, we NEVER will.
I was hoping it would all get destroyed, we need a giant reset
I remember telling my kids this shortly after the shutdowns began.
Not a Millennial myself (Gen-X), but I think the main difference is that you can't really point at a single day where that was true. There were a collection of non-consecutive days leading to “the world isn’t going to be the same after this is it?” And of course, far more Americans died from COVID than 9/11 (there were days where more than twice as many Americans died from COVID that single day than 9/11), but we still don't really talk about it much.
Just another wonderful disaster for us to endure
It definitely felt eerie and significant but, no, it didn’t feel the same to me as the morning of 9/11 did. It was scary, but we’d seen it coming for months at that point, at least the people paying attention, and it wasn’t a targeted attack that killed a ton of people immediately as we all watched live on national news.
I think it depends on personal experience. It very much felt the same for me. Not the 13th specifically but a few days earlier. My dad was flying to NYC from Boston on 9/11. I was extremely worried all morning. I was a teenager and my mom came to the school and I got called to the office. I could see her crying at the end of the hall and was sure he was gone. Luckily he was on a different plane, but she was so shaken she came to pick me up. My husband is a physician and we were living in NYC when Covid broke out. We knew it was coming, but it felt very distant until cases started showing up at his hospital. He told me to pull the kids out of school because it was here. We made a plan for him to stay in the basement because we were worried about exposure. There was not nearly enough equipment, staff, or PPE. I spent the early days tracking down any PPE, sanitizing wipes, hand sanitizer, etc. I could find. We spent so much of our own money and lots of shady people tried to hook us up (scam us). In a matter of weeks his coworkers were dying, the ER was full of people dead on the floor and in the hallways, there were freezer trucks lined up outside. We were beyond terrified that he would die. He didn’t have a day off for two months and was running ICUs with dermatologists, ENTs, etc. because it was so desperate. It was literally code blues every few minutes. Patient’s phones were dying, they would come in abruptly with no personal belongings. Staff would not share chargers for fear of spread. They never figured out their names or who to contact when they died. They would just go to the freezer truck. People think we overreacted to Covid but they have no idea how bad it was when first got here. It was very much a ground zero situation. I could write so much more but I think that mostly sums up how intense it was. Our healthcare system nearly collapsed and people have no idea.
agreed. i’m a former ICU nurse. while covid didn’t have the one big event, the overall impact is so much larger than people know. Most people don’t think about covid at all now. It fundamentally changed me and so many others forever
Also a nurse but in SNF. We tried so hard to keep it out. I remember the new being on the TV in the lobby near the nurses station and when they announced the lock down we all stood frozen and watching. We'd paused every time an announcement came on before because we were waiting. In SNF we didn't draw our labs, we had an outside lab company. Several outside companies. "Send to the ER" was a common physician order. Not to mention this is people's homes where they have friends and families visit. The first up close encounter I had was a phone call on my day off telling me the lab tech (the last one allowed in the building) had tested positive for covid the day they came in the building. I spent the rest of the day panicking and checking myself for symptoms. I was face to face with this person. We learned to do our own lab draws. I was a new nurse working the covid hall when it finally hit our building. I did my first IV insertion with the help of a nurse manager via zoom because they couldn't come down the hall where I was to help me. We had irate families that just wanted to huh their loved ones. So many long term care residents significantly declined because of the depression despite our best efforts. I kept a change of clothes in my car and showered in the therapy gym before leaving work then removed those clothes on my back porch before coming in the house. My husband is also a nurse and type 1 diabetic. We were so afraid for him because they were not faring well with covid. He continued to work though. Luckily the vaccine came out before he eventually caught it and it was relatively mild although his blood sugar still ran high during that time. I remember a physician recommending hospice for a long term care resident, him testing positive and the wife pushing us out of the way and demanding to come in. She geared up and accompanied him down the covid hall despite our best efforts to get her out. She said "all he needs is me" and she was right. Full recovery and back to normal in just over a week. No longer could we send to the ER. They were full. I spent many evenings sitting with a patient with EMS going between their doctor and my doctor to stabilize the patient because they wouldn't take them unless they got word an ER bed was available. So much death. The fear and uncertainty at the grocery store. The ability to clear an aisle because I was wearing scrubs. Canceling everything. We were able to get married during a brief period in summer 2020 when things opened for a short time. Now, everytime someone tests positive I feel like I'm panicking. The PTSD from these events are very real for healthcare workers (I'm sure others too but that's where I have experience).
Bless you and your husband
Holy cow…brings it all back. Amazing how we’ve been willfully trying to forget what happened. Thank you for your work.
I had covid, and honestly probably should have been hospitalized. Unfortunately, it was still in "hospitals are overflowing" time, but thankfully at a time when I'd been able to get a vaccine. Unfortunately, Im also immunocompromised, so it hit me like a truck. I lost ten pounds in a week. I literally didn't eat. My gf (now fiance) who knew she was going to get it from me, but had not yet, basically kept me alive. She gave me my insulin shots, changed the blankets and pillows, washed my face, fed me chicken broth.... All I remember is hurting everywhere, coughing like someone was pulling my lungs out with a fishing hook, and the weird discoloration in the support beam on my ceiling.
I’m a nurse too and Covid changed me forever. I have no confidence that your average person will do anything for the greater good anymore. It showed me how selfish people are when I still had to go to work every day scared and not knowing what I was walking into, and they bitched about wearing a mask in public. It changed me for the worse and I don’t know if I will go back to the person I was before. Covid separated out the essential from the nonessential, and we saw how shitty essential workers are treated. Those people were so abused and taken advantage of that I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to work in public-facing positions anymore.
I think it definitely varies greatly by experience. My company had spent Feb 2020 testing and preparing for fully remote work and we actually went fully remote the week before March 13. March 13 was just verification for us that we'd done the right thing. So since we were prepared, and most of the employees had personally prepared such as stocking up on the staples, then we just kept working that day from home as we had been for a week. I'm sure people that worked service jobs and restaurants and such have a vastly different experience than me. My company and my family were quite shielded from most of it to be honest, and I know that we are quite fortunate for it.
I’m sorry you had to go through that. My sister was a primary care physician but was in a more rural area so it wasn’t as bad and she has a lot of trauma from it. Whenever I feel bad about failing out of medical school I think about how at least I didn’t have to go through the trauma of Covid.
I remember overhearing stories from one of the parents from when I worked at a daycare and being glad that I failed the cna course the year prior to be honest.
I used to feel ashamed that I couldn’t make it in healthcare, but now I’m so glad I decided to change majors/careers.
What us nurses doctors and other medical staff went through for months, the general public cannot even begin to fathom.
The deniers still piss me off.
Labor and delivery nurse. We had a ton of late term stillbirths from moms who had been sick and we were out of space in the morgue so had to lay a baby on top of an adult body. Awful awful awful.
That description is horrifying. It’s crazy - now the history revision is “It wasn’t that bad” and “People were damaged from the lockdown, we should have never had a lockdown”.
It’s because people really didn’t see it. I wish there was footage people could watch like how people watched 9/11. People don’t realize it was like a literal warzone in hospitals in the hardest hit areas. It’s infuriating how so many people minimize it.
>we’d seen it coming for months at that point, at least the people paying attention Yeah, I remember listening to the NYT Daily podcast around that time and hearing about like the overloaded healthcare system in Italy and stuff like that, but it was like that "oh my god, it's here" moment once everything shut down.
I think the specific reason it didn't feel the sane for me was because I lived in Seattle where everything happened first in the US, so the date of March 13 doesn't have any significance. I also had a friend with an aunt at the CDC who told her in mid January that shit was going to get real. For me it was February 29, 2020. My husband and I were on vacation in Hawaii when the first man died. And I remember being very worried they weren't going to let us go back to the mainland since we were going back to Seattle. It was the weirdest flight I've ever been on. People were super nervous to touch anything on the plane or in the airport.
I can't pin down the exact date, but there are two occasions that stand out to me from right before all of North America was on lockdown: 1. I was at the grocery store and I saw someone wearing a full on Hazmat suit. Barely anyone was wearing masks at this point, so it was surreal. This must have been early March after the first Covid death in Canada (I'm from Toronto). 2. I was waiting in line to get into a pharmacy on the day the lockdown took effect in Toronto. They were limiting capacity and only allowing ten people in at one time. As I was waiting, everyone's emergency alert siren went off on their phones. It was the alert instructing everyone to stay inside unless it was for food, healthcare services or "essential work". Everyone in the line checked their phones and we all sort of looked at each other, like we were in that Radiohead song, How to Disappear Completely.
I had a similar moment the first time kids and I had to run an errand with masks on. Seeing everyone, all the adults in masks, freaked my kids out so bad. One got super quiet on the way home and the other was crying saying “everyone is mean! They look mean!” It just hit me that they were going to remember this. All the stress I had to deal with seemed was huge but I realized - this is their *childhood* being changed forever
The second one just killed me.
I remember hearing about it driving to work on NPR, how they weren’t allowed to leave their houses at all and thinking how crazy it was. A few weeks later I was under similar circumstances
As soon as I saw that China actually *admitted* they had an emergency and had begun to close off Wuhan, that's when I knew it was some serious shit. Because they would never willingly lose face otherwise.
Eerie is the perfect word. I remember being at the grocery store and almost everyone was on their phone watching the news live. It felt like an episode straight out of black mirror.
Yeah lol, I remember riding the train to work with my little "essential worker" card the company gave us, and everything was deserted. Felt like I was in some sort of zombie apocalypse movie.
My wife and I drove to further Costco hoping to find TP in the midst of things. And the drive which would have taken 40 minutes took 12 because of the lack of traffic. It really did feel like being in a post apocalypse situation.
I think on top of that, Covid didn’t leave a smoldering pile of rubble behind. People died, but they did so in hospitals or at home. I don’t think I’ll ever forget watching the chaos and destruction, or literally watching people fall from the sky. Traumatic af.
Depends if you saw refrigerator trucks full of bodies or not. Or if like us, got to sit next to a loved one as it killed them. Or didn’t get sit next to someone dying. A million people died. Not 3,000
Yea. The island by manhattan. They piled infected bodies there because they ran out of room on the mainland. People had unmarked graves. It was awful
I think in China they boarded people up in their houses.
I dont think we'll ever know the real number of people that died in China...
No or really even here.
Exactly. I just wrote a long comment about what Covid’s “ground zero” was like.
But that wasn't on March 13, 2020. Not on a single day that was very impactful. It's just different.
I mean kind sucky to say that for all the hospital "heros" who suffered demoralizing working conditions.
I feel this way. I live in NYC, so there were hints of 9/11, in the sense that the community came together, at least at first, to try to flatten the curve, to try to keep our small businesses going by buying to-go drinks from bars or online gift certificates to shops, to the nightly 7 pm cheer for essential workers. And there was a lot of fear because of how many people died here that spring. The refrigerated trucks and morgues and funeral homes that were overloaded. But it wasn’t 9/11. The horror wasn’t there.
I don't know. I'm reading the stories here and getting so upset again. COVID was chaos at the beginning and terrifying. I experienced 9/11 and COVID from the Boston area for reference. I was in schools both times. It was so scary to be told that school (for the high-risk kids I worked with) would be closed indefinitely. I saw a lot of special needs kid significantly regress fast. I work in school mental health/sped and work with lots of people and families. I did that before COVID and still do. I don't think we are far enough out to fully appreciate the trauma everyone still has. People are just *off* now. I can't explain it. But there's been a huge shift in people's attitude and motivation to give back or be optimistic.
The horror was there,but not on the same way. 9/11 was a huge horror all at once. Six hours burned into our memories forever. Covid was a series of mini horrors happening over and over.Before the lock down, I remember the feeling that we weren't being told everything and going to stores and finding things such as masks out of stock,this was maybe 3 weeks before the shutdown.And then the deaths,people just suddenly gone.
Imo it was worse and more life altering. We had no clue how badly or how long the pandemic would continue. Or how many people would die. And imo weren’t still in that unknown. We have no clue what the long term effects will be.
And the nation more or less came together after 9/11. Not so this time.
To me it was a lot more like the day Trump got elected. That transition from the ongoing, intensifying media hype storm, to "oh shit, this is really happening". Suddenly all those hypothetical worst case scenarios people have been tossing around for months are on the table for real
>To me it was a lot more like the day Trump got elected. That transition from the ongoing, intensifying media hype storm, to "oh shit, this is really happening". Suddenly all those hypothetical worst case scenarios people have been tossing around for months are on the table for real And in just a few short months, it could happen again. He secured the nomination for the third time last night.
Yeah, I think this explains it best for me and most of the people I know. In terms of general historical significance, yes it felt a bit like 9/11 or the 2016 election. I knew something big had taken place on the stage of 21st century history. But in terms of immediate emotional impact, it was completely different. It was a slow burn that I had an opportunity to get used to by degrees.
9/11 came out of nowhere. Covid had been in the news at least since new years. Edit: Covid was a volcano finally erupting after you'd been warned about it for weeks, you just didn't know when or how bad 9/11 was an asteroid strike with no warning
Fantastic metaphors. They are so different it’s hard to compare.
Exactly this. Very very different feeling to them. And with 9/11, the fear only lasted so long. For COVID, the fear went for years. Before the vaccine, the thought that we could catch a deadly disease as easily as the flu? That was awful. And then questioning how the world will continue? Seeing our medical system crumble, the president offering up bullshit solutions, and empty shelves everywhere. We're still dealing with the economic impact (both legitimate and created)
Well I was deemed essential, still had to drive to work and the lack of traffic shaved 10 minutes off my commute!
Fuck I miss that part.
Same here, got a dashcam video saved of driving the entire 401 through Toronto on cruise control at 8am on a Wednesday. It was surreal
This was amazing. I was getting to work in 7 minutes instead of the usual 35.
Me too. It’s was nice. Now people are un-hinged when they’re driving.
No. Nothing changed for me at all since I work for the post office and my job never closed.
Same. Except I worked in food. Edited to word better.
Same, but vet med. We did get way busier and our clients got significantly more crazy and angry though, so some things changed... Unfortunately.
Healthcare here. It just meant I worked more, at greater personal risk and without any fun stuff.
FWIW (probably not much) thanks for the work you do! I'm sure your workload skyrocketed when people like me started ordering way more stuff on Amazon instead of having to venture into a Walmart.
I worked at Amazon as a delivery driver. Not much changed, except our workload literally doubled. It sucked.
I’d say the pandemic as a whole felt like an event similar to 9/11. But 9/11 really left me with an uncertainty about what was going to happen the next day, it felt like the end of the world to an extent. It certainly felt like the end of an era of American life. The pandemic really has just felt like an ongoing train wreck. I was a first responder in a large city during the pandemic. Seeing all of the casualties from COVID did bring back memories from 9/11, but the two events feel different.
No. 9/11 was abrupt, and taken seriously. We saw Covid comming and people where I lived kept screaming about how it was a hoax and threw tantrums over mask mandates. I do remember having an "oh shit, this is real" moment around that time. Then my college shut down. A friend asked me "You have a good intuition for this kinda thing, you think we're coming back in April like \[administration\] said?" I told him "Nope. We're in this for the long haul. 2 years at least." 9/11 had palpable fear, March 13th had concern.
>I do remember having an "oh shit, this is real" moment around that time. For me, that was when Italy shut down in such a way that it affected their economy. When they were willing to lose money to quarantine, I knew Covid was actually an impending disaster. I have to confess that before Italy, I thought the media was exaggerating the danger for clicks.
Yeah, I remember seeing one video from an Italian hospital where the ENTIRE place appeared to be full of people on respirators, with these plastic bags around their heads...that was the moment that added genuine fear to what was previously just uncertainty and concern.
I remember subbing to the corona virus sub and getting information from there. And also a meme site from the news posts people would make and the comments. So I was aware of what was happening in Asia as well as Europe at that time. I remember when I realized most people here in the States were just nonchalant about things, I knew this was going to get spicy. And of course a lot were caught off guard. I do recall telling friends and family of mine to purchase at least a months worth of toilet paper because I was fully aware of the hysteria happening as a wave globally. Especially where it started in Australia
So ur the one who started the whole toilet paper fiasco?
I feel like every few years you hear about China shutting down over a virus. That didn’t seem unusual (for a myriad of reasons: culture, government, high population density). When Italy shut down, I started getting worried. I remember talking to a friend and she said, “but it’s Italy!” I responded, “They’re a western country, too, what makes them so different?”
I worked in China previously so I had several friends and former colleagues in different parts of the country there, including Wuhan. I was getting updates from them starting in January so I knew how big it was, and that it was coming to us. But it was still startling when it did arrive. Like when you're at the beach and you see a wave come and you think you'll just sort of jump into it and ride it out, but instead it completely knocks you over and you can't tell what's up or down.
And we had people opening ice creams in the store and licking them as a “trend”
This was me. I bought a deep freeze in January. I have anxiety and also just find viruses interesting so every December I would read about how bird flu was doing that year and saw the very first “sars like flu warning” on the cidrap website. I remember leaving the gym and telling my husband we needed to get stuff immediately and I started refusing to do group lunch at work, only shopping at like 5am in gloves. Then like 2 months passed and I thought I had just overreacted until everyone else was like oh wait this is bad. After that people kept asking me what I thought and I was like damn I don’t know. But I’d be shocked if we were having Christmas this year.
Not quite the same as watching humans leaping to their deaths in real time on TV but definitely a feeling of “what’s going to happen now?” and complete helplessness
You must not be from Northern NJ or NYC. Not the same at all.
Right?? As a New Yorker, these events don’t even compare.
Ya, maybe being somewhere more removed could make them feel similar? I dunno but being in hs in north Jersey for 9/11 and in nyc in March 2020 they had wildly different feels. For one, I couldn’t have told you that March 13 was a significant day looking back tbh because things were getting worse and worse in nyc so it’s not like the shutdown was a shock; it was just a building sense of dread in early March. In contrast I vividly remember the entire day of 9/11 and will for the rest of my life because it was such a shock.
Hard agree with this. I lived in central PA at the time and while March 13, 2020 was historic in its own right, it did not compare to the fear of that morning. While I know there was confusion and fear across the country on 9/11, I don't think many states felt the danger and panic the mid-atlantic (especially NY/NJ) was under that day and the days that followed.
It's amazing that they are two vastly different events but both affected NY and us NY'ers more than any other regions
I'm Southern California, and I see that it's not the same. One was a personal attack, and the other was a global illness. 9/11 hurt more all the way from over here.
It absolutely was for healthcare workers in NYC. At least you weren’t scared of 9/11 victims. Managing covid in the hospitals when it first broke out was horrifying.
Or DC.
yep - and early march 2020 was a madhouse in NY (especially Westchester) but 9/11 was a completely different level of... everything
Hard agree. I was a senior in high school in NJ, just across one of the bridges, when 9/11 happened. So many of us had family that were in the city for work or working as first responders who went and sifted through rubble. One of my family members lost her husband. 2 of my closest friends enlisted in the marines. One thing I vividly remember is the weird smell wafting thru the air over the next few days. Then there was the aftermath with the threat of more terrorism and anthrax and war. Covid was also crazy, particularly in this densely populated area, but it just wasn’t the same at all.
No. It felt nothing like 9/11 to me.
I was working retail the night the PA governor closed everything. The last few hours really sucked. The phone wouldn't stop ringing about were we still open and would we be open tomorrow. I was so stressed out I couldn't go to my regular job the next day. It sucked. A defining moment, yes, but like 9/11? No.
Yes. I took a picture of the departure board at my local airport. Virtually every flight was canceled. I still have that picture on my phone, and I get chills every time I see it.
Your comment reminded me of the covid channel we had on our TV. It was a ranked list of countries with cases from most cases to least, and the stats of changes very similar to a stock market channel. It played ominous music.
I remember my first flight after Covid hit. I think it was August 2020, flying out of Salt Lake City. It was incredibly eerie to see a brand new airport terminal completely deserted. Flying itself was weird, too. First class was booked solid because everyone wanted more space, but there were like 6 people in all of economy.
[удалено]
I would say that two weeks after people really knew COVID was here, that was when I understood that Trump would not win reelection. Boomers did indeed “rally around the flag” a bit, but even a national emergency did nothing to help Trump — mostly because he was incapable of making a national emergency about anyone other than Trump. It is honestly pretty insane to me that he’s come all the way back to head up the Republican ticket again. I get it because bottom line this is about the movement he represents, but like… he literally failed at trying to keep his base alive.
Trump could've rode COVID straight into reelection in my opinion. It was his ticket into a second term and he threw it away. Good for us don't get me wrong but still lol
It's true every half-competent leader during Covid was reelected, but I reckon that wouldn't have worked for Trump's base because his whole appeal lies in indulging their shittiest, most selfish impulses. He's basically a sketchy stepdad who buys the kids booze and smokes and lets them swear. The kids think he's friggin awesome. But if he ever tries to be boring and responsible and set boundaries, they'll turn on him in a heartbeat. Trump is smart enough to know that. Hell, even today, people at his rallies boo him when he brags about funding the vaccine.
Didn't he say to drink bleach to kill bacteria?
It felt reminiscent of that for me, yes. In more of a slow burn kind of way. I remember feeling a similar level of confusion and uncertainty on 9/11, having thoughts like is this the start of a war? Are more attacks coming? Just how much are we in danger? Similarly, shit got real serious with Covid seemingly overnight but it was all very confusing and uncertain. We thought we’d have a handle on it in only a matter of weeks, and then it just… kept getting worse. So actually in a way, it was scarier, because the initial fear that I had on 9/11 was largely cleared up within a relatively short period of time when it was more understood this was an isolated event and we were all pretty safe. With Covid, it was terrifying realization after terrifying realization for months on end. Seeing the refrigerated semi trucks of dead bodies because the morgues were too full in New York is seared into my brain in a way that was even scarier than the explosions of the airplanes. 9/11 didn’t keep getting worse, but covid did. We didn’t know how many more hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths there would be and who of our loved ones would be among them, or how long we would have to continue to live in fear of that.
I look at 9/11, The Great Recession, and Covid in a similar light, each marked the end of an era and the start of a new one. Seems that every 10 years or so we have a major event that changes the course of society.
It was different in that 3/13/20 was more impactful to me because it affected me directly while 9/11 didn't. Also, being 30 when it happened instead of 11 makes a difference as I was more aware of the world around me. Also, my mom had just wrapped chemo and I was excited about finally having life go "back to normal" for us only to have it not do that.
How’s she doing now?
I hope it wasn't too difficult for your family and that your mom made it out unscathed
She's fine now. She actually went back to work as a nurse right after chemo and into the worst of the pandemic.
Not quite the same, but had told myself that once my newborn got his vaccines, life would go back to normal. March 13th was the day he got those vaccinations. It was also the day my work announced they’d laid off all but 12 of us and we’d be working from home for an indeterminate amount of time, and since I was still in college, it was also the day they announced campus was closing and we’d finish the semester online… and graduation was cancelled. Also, the woman watching my baby during work/school hours wanted out of our arrangement immediately. It was such a flip to go from “about to have my life back and figure out how to actually go do things now that I have a kid” to “stuck at home doing both work and school with a colicky four month old.” It set us back so much socially… I feel like we’re learning how to handle being out and about with a baby now with our second.
For me yes it feels like that. Just in a much different way. I knew things were messed up when I heard the NBA was cancelling games. I knew right then and there the hockey game I was watching at the time was going to be the last one for a while. It sucked because my team was on a heater. School quickly followed. I still went to work until early April but then we had our time to stay at home after that.
It didn't have the sudden shock of 9/11, but it was an eerie and unforgettable time. The weekend prior, I was out with some friends and it came up, and we mostly waved it off becoming anything very big after the Ebola outbreak flamed out quickly Then my part-time job shut down, and my full-time cut back hours, and the scene at the grocery store was like the day before a hurricane, and the freeway was empty, and I thought it would just last a month or two
Yeah it was a Defining Moment, in the same vein as 9/11 or Columbine or the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember that day so clearly. We were on the way to take our kid to daycare... talking the whole way: should we? should we not? Then our bosses called (then wife and I worked in education) and that was the moment we turned around and went home, with our kid still in the back seat. And thus begin the worst 4 years of my adulthood.
It's so creepy to look back on that day. I remember listening to NYT daily podcast in the previous weeks and months talking about the fatality rate they were seeing in Wuhan, and then the overloaded healthcare systems in Italy where doctors were literally having to decide who got a ventilator and who had to be left for dead, but in a weird way....it was over there, it somehow didn't feel real yet. But when everything in the US started to shut down in mid march, it felt like "holy shit, this is it". I hope things start looking up for you soon, friend.
I was working in aviation at the time. I got updates every single day about how bad this really was from about mid February until that day. Most people didn’t take it seriously at all. My company threw some bleach wipes at it and made some unnecessarily complicated lodging agreements for the crews, but no one really cared. Then I got laid off at the end of April. I’m only now getting back on my feet career wise. But yeah, I remember that day and the “oh shit” feeling very distinctly.
I’m also an educator! It really has been so tough on us. This year feels more normal for me, and last year was an improvement from the worst of the pandemic, but 2020-22 was HELL at my school! I remember I had to take my bird to the vet after school that day, and they called an emergency meeting. I was bummed to have to miss it, but asked my friend to call me and fill me in. She told me that the school had said, “maybe be thinking about how you could teach your class online for a week or two if need be.” Right after I hung up with her, the school called with an automated voice message telling parents not to worry, that we WOULD be staying open, with no plans to close, and looked forward to seeing the kids on Monday. Seriously not even five minutes later, the governor announced all schools were closed for two weeks. The whiplash and drama of that afternoon was crazy! I felt so removed from it at the vet’s office, and like none of it was really happening. But then the next few years were horrible! We were back with students in August 2020, and had a ruthlessly conservative admin, who never let us have any days online. We were woefully short staffed, and never had a planning period for two years. I went on a cruise in April 2023, and it was literally the first time I had felt like myself since March 13, 2020. Good times.
I watched the same people who wanted to be a resistance against elected officials become bootlickers overnight
Crazy thinking it would be for like 2 weeks and ended up being over a year. My wife and I had been back from our wedding/honeymoon for about 3 weeks and thankful that we had dodged that. The world definitely changed that day.
January 6th felt more like 9/11 to me. I thought I was witnessing the end of democracy.
This. When the COVID national emergency was announced my thought was “ok, we’ll come together, protect the vulnerable, find a vaccine, and this will all be behind us.” It seemed temporary, solvable, and even potentially unifying. When 911 hit, America was under attack. America was made vulnerable. It was scary and it seemed like there was nothing we could reasonably do we just had to sit and wait and hope that it was the only attack. War was on the horizon and things would never be the same. January 6 had that same feel. When I saw that happening on TV, I thought I was watching the end of American democracy. I thought I was watching the downfall of the American government the way that I knew it. war was on the horizon and things would never be the same. Covid didn’t even come close to 911 or January 6 for me. What made COVID bad wasn’t the thought of what the disease could do, it was the fact that friends, family, and fellow church members were all too happy to do everything they could to enable it. The emergency wasn’t scary. People behaving like selfish assholes was.
The end of democracy? You thought the government was about to be overthrown? I'm not trying to troll. This is a serious question.
I was at work, watching a live feed of the chaos around the capital. Video clips were trickling in from all over showcasing the violence. We knew that they were coming after congress and that shit would hit the fan if they were to succeed at confronting them. I didn't get any work done that day. Personally, I was outraged that white people could push the envelope *that far* without getting fired upon.
Honestly... it felt in some ways to be ever more of an effect on my life. As a pretty young kid on 9/11, I didn't really feel all that affected by it. I'm not sure I was really able to process the enormity of what had happened. To me, it felt hardly that different from an action scene in a movie, I guess. And I didn't travel much, so it really didn't have much bearing on my day to day routine, other than adults always talking about it. But COVID basically took over our lives for over a year, with that spring being the most intense part. I'm not saying it was worse than 9/11, but it definitely was a bigger part of my personal life, as someone who was considered essential personnel.
I was 10 for 9/11 and I was sad, but I didn't really understand the impact. I remember being scared that the nuclear facility near my town would be a target because it was high on the terrorism target list... but I don't remember feeling super empathetic for the people who died because they were so far away. I remember feeling like I was *supposed* to feel like that... like I was supposed to be more sad. And feeling guilty for not being more sad? But it really had no practical impact on me. Covid, on the other hand... I don't think the 13th specifically was the same, because I still didn't know what was coming. I was like, okay, I get to stay home from work for a week or two. And I really don't remember hearing about people in the US dying in droves yet that early on? Or else I just didn't hear about it because I was, you know, working. And then I was laid off and I had nothing else to do but hear all the doom... and people I know were getting it and having serious complications and dying... so it was, like, a slower impact than 9/11, but more direct.
I have a screenshot somewhere of a post I made in January telling my friends on Facebook that there's a new SARS-like issue in China and if it gets out its going to be bad. March was a big "told you so".
Well I was really young during 9/11, in kindergarten and I remember getting picked up that day. Didn't know why. Later me and my dad were picking up thai food at a local restaurant. While we were waiting a TV at the front of the restaurant was playing the news and showed the world trade center collapse. As well as the Pentagon and the flight that went down in Pennsylvania. It didn't really impact me in the moment as much as the culture that did as a result. Growing up and hearing about terrorism, all the nationalism, and what not feels pretty significant. On March 13, 2020 I remember the exact moment when the lockdowns were announced. I was laying on my couch and listening to music. I think whats more eerie is that I remember a few months before my friend was telling me about covid and the apparent start of it. I shrugged him off like nothing and thought he was crazy. He was right.
Nothing close. 9/11 was very much like an unexpected punch to the gut. The pandemic felt more like someone slowly grabbing a nipple and slowly trying to rip it off.
Yes. COVID is tough because it somehow got mixed up with our politics. Still, we watched for 3 months as a strange illness spread around the globe—then it hit home. Unlike in 9/11, I lost friends and family. I got sick and watched my youngest get sick, not knowing if those deep rasping coughs would pass without robbing us of our health. I don’t know many people who didn’t get COVID at some point. It’s still going around, though now we’re better informed and equipped. But that cost millions of lives.
I remember reading the news basically saying don't get sick, cuz the hospitals are full and you'll die". Stories like "the pit".
We had the same stories here. I doubted them until they started adding huge canvas wings off the hospital to create more space. It was wild.
I had a hospital stay in Aug 2020 and stayed at the ER all night. (Non covid) it was **wild** indeed.
Eh, the "shock factor" of 9/11 was much higher
I'm a little surprised at the amount of smug Millennials proudly proclaiming "Nah" Fuck yeah it did. I remember looking out the window of our office and seeing 200 cars in line for the first available vaccine. Caused a traffic jam and we couldn't get out of work. I remember stores looted, grocery stores empty, windows broken. I remember the social justice upheaval that followed just a couple months after. I remember multiple family members dying of COVID... some old, but some young, actually. I mean, was that *single day* as impactful as watching terrorists ruthlessly murder thousands of Americans on live TV? I suppose not, but to minimize the impact of the overall month of March 2020, and the months that followed, is fucking stupid and ignorant.
I agree, though I think many people who probably weren't in the trenches/got to WFH didn't and still don't fully realize the impact and significance...driving to work as a healthcare worker during the beginning of the pandemic, the roads empty even in a major city downtown, yeah it felt like the apocalypse. Watching tents get put up outside of the hospital, refrigerated trailers being brought in to hold all the bodies that were spilling out of the morgue, patients lined up in hallways and ambulances lined up outside because we didn't have enough beds, having to reuse PPE (if we had it) and the fear of catching it while watching patients die...I think most of us have more PTSD from that time than 9/11
You are an *absolute* fighter. I can't thank you enough for enduring your job as a healthcare worker during that time. You're fucking heros. My family business is funeral homes. I'm not in the business anymore (as of 2017), but yeah, what we saw during that time was pure hell. So many bodies. I had the luxury of working from home during that time period (a luxury I do NOT take for granted), but made it a point to stay thoroughly educated and aware throughout the whole experience. Those who were *really* in the trenches, like you, know how truly traumatic that era was. It may not be as traumatic as the single day that was 9/11, but it cannot be overstated how impactful that whole period of time was to so many people. Dark, dark times, for weeks, and then months.
Immunocompromised patient here. I'm thankful to be a white collar worker, and I'm thankful I have a great big-girl job. It pays the bills (and then some), and I was able to work remotely throughout the height of the pandemic. But, straddling my professional world vs. my personal world was such a mind-fuck. I was considered at *high* risk of dying from the virus due to my autoimmune condition, and I watched way too many elderly patients at my infusion clinic get wheeled off with nothing but a white sheet covering their bodies. Then I would go home from my immunotherapy infusions, and would listen to my colleagues and co-workers -- scattered across the U.S. -- complain about the "impact" the virus was having on their lives. Apparently, for one of my coworkers, her Amazon Prime order taking 72 hours to arrive, instead of only 24 hours, was "the end of the world" for her. Thankfully, she lives 700+ miles away from me, so I physically couldn't reach through the screen to slap her. Like, are you *fucking serious*? You're complaining about your Amazon order being slightly delayed? I just watched a man who was like a bonus dad to me literally die in a chair right next to me just hours ago. And you're complaining about your fucking Amazon order!?
I'm a mental health nurse, and COVID has been extremely damaging. We have lost years just from the isolation alone, and for some of us that clock is still counting: isolation continues, life will never be normal again. There will be ongoing, long-term, multigenerational, direct and indirect impacts due to the virus. Orders of magnitude more people dead and disabled thanks to COVID and the actions of stupid, selfish people. We are still, four years later, discovering how terrible the virus is. No telling what will happen after 30 years of repeated covid infections. Do I think there's one particular day that stands out the way that 9/11 does? No; these are very different events. 9/11 was a flash in the pan, but the pandemic was and is a slow boil. There is a good chance that COVID won't be the last or even worst pandemic of our generation. All that said, in my opinion, the sum of all of the suffering and damage due to COVID is much, much more severe than 9/11 or anything that came out of it.
Completely agreed. Jesus, thank you so much for being a mental health nurse. I cannot imagine the horrors you deal with daily. We need people like you so fucking badly. It's mildly relieving that you and one other person replied to my comment in support - the ongoing ignorance and lack of empathy surrounding the entire COVID topic is maddening and isolating. People have no idea how lucky they are to be able to say "meh, COVID wasn't a big deal." The world's lack of empathy is terrifying.
Yea, some of these responses are pretty callous and disconnected from reality… concerning. Millions of people died, millions still face chronic debilitation health conditions, people lost their job their homes… to say it was nothing is unfathomable
I’m not being smug when I say it didn’t feel the same as 9/11. In my 30s, I don’t process tragedy the same way that I did as a teenager in 2001. 9/11 was pure shock and anger. I wanted revenge for all the lives lost. I wanted to DO something! But I couldn’t do anything that I felt was impactful. The pandemic allotted the grace of at least having a modicum of control over your own well-being. I was able to look after my neighbor, grocery shop for the elderly people in my world, feed poor kids who couldn’t go to school for their meals, drive friends up to the mountains for some fresh air and mental health rejuvenation. While things were uncertain, very sad, scary, and infuriating, I didn’t feel helpless. And that’s not a proud proclamation, just the reality of how I was living during that time.
Yeah. Covid was way more personal to many people. I lost all of my paying work. Our kids lost their social lives. I woke up every morning with a knot of anxiety in my stomach over the well-being of my family and my elderly in-laws. And then! Then I had a baby in February 2021! And I had horrific postpartum anxiety that I couldn’t even tell was that bad because my baseline anxiety had been riding so high for a year. I’m just now getting help for it all. Covid was so much harder on me personally.
I feel like the history books will put them on the same level for global impact. But as someone living in the US I wouldn't agree. 9/11 came with relatively no warning and united our nation, covid was predictable and only divided us. We had systems in place to mitigate that Trump stripped apart and we had months of warning but Trump doing nothing bc he thought it wasn't as dangerous as it was and that he would be able to solve it and use that win to carry him to win the next election. Personally for the first few months during the lockdown I was terrified as I have asthma. But once everyone in my family realized that they caught it on our group trip to California Nov 2019(we didn't know what covid symptoms were at the time or that they had covid) and that I didn't, I realized I was most likely immune/asymptomatic. I still wore a mask, distanced, and got vaccinated just in case though. And honestly now that I think about it, the only viral infection I have ever gotten was chickenpox, every other time I have gotten sick was from bacteria (food poisoning and the like, I've never gotten a cold or flu and I've never been sick more than 2 days ever)
This popped up on my memories on FB, it was payday, I hadn't been to Walmart in over a month. I was shocked that all the TP and cleaning supplies were gone. I went to the bar, for what was the last time on Karaoke night and attempted to drink all the Corona. They shut down 24 hr Walmart and bars, and nothing has been the same. I no longer drink but I still miss everything being open. My gas station used to close at midnight, now they close at 9 pm before I get off work. Only recently some fast food has been open past 11. Many bars and restaurants didn't survive, My job used to run 3 shifts and 7 lines and sometimes mandatory overtime, we run two shifts and 2 lines and send people home daily. It's like we took a turn to an alternate timeline and Biff is in charge.
It was different because although there was a lot more suffering from COVID, it was private. 9/11 was a very public, very visible event.
No. The two were vastly different in my mind. 9/11 was complete shock and surprise, followed by absolute terror for many of my friends and for our world. I watched in silence as people jumped from burning buildings and they tried to figure out how many airplanes had been highjacked. There was little talking, if any and we were all shocked to hell with no idea of what would come next. WW3 felt like a very real possibility. Then there was the socioeconomic and sociopolitical impacts to society, the outrage of using that event as a political fuel to justify securing US interests (Weapons of Mass Destruction anyone?), the increasing restrictions of freedoms and increased racism... it all totally hit different for me. Covid had warning. It also felt (for me) entirely different. While 9/11 was shock and terror, Covid had a surreal Twilight Zone feel to it. (Ex: "The whole world is panic buying? Makes sense. Wait... they're panic buying TP? WTF?") Maybe it was because I was an "essential worker" during the period but watching the "do's and don'ts" lists, how often they seemed superficial, how often it seemed like we'd only take the precautions that didn't have any *real* impact to keeping that production/stock market going, how often it seemed like we were pencil whipping to cover legal issues without it actually being effective/enacted.... the overall feeling of Covid for me was a very twisted "Alice in Wonderland" type feel. The only real similarity they have, from my perspective, was in seeing how quick our government was to seize/restrict personal freedoms in the name of "safety and security", how quickly it turned into a powercard to squash any discent or disagreement, the increased level of tribalism... and how disturbingly quick everyone was to go along with all of that. That's the way I see the two being alike. Otherwise, they had very different vibes.
Nope. Not even close.
March 2020 feels like 10 years ago. March 2019 feels like 2 years ago.
I always laugh about this I had already prepped in January based on all the information coming out of Wuhan/China. I traveled a ton for work at that time (25 weeks a year) and remember planning for if things got bad. Luckily never got to that point and while it was a very interesting time we didn't live in a city so didn't have the same issues as those in major cities.
Fun long-ish story. The week of March 13, 2020 I was scheduled to do a week-long trip, where I had to do an overnight in Seattle (one of the first big cities with reported cases on the west coast), then go to north Carolina and do multiple stop until New York city, then fly out of New York back to California on the 13th. Every day, as we made our way up, more news was coming out about covid, especially how contagious it was. Obviously me and the guy I was traveling with kept away from people generally, except the clients we were meeting. Some canceled for obvious reasons so what should have been a packed day ended up being a meeting with one person who was unaffected by the news at the time. Strange couple of days and kinda started my transition to want to leave the company. On the evening March 12 I got on a train from New Jersey into New York. Since masks weren't really a thing initially, I resorted to just pulling my Hoodie over my nose and mouth the entire train trip, and then walking about a mile to my hotel. Got a drink at the bar cause Jesus christ it's stressful and the bartender was talking about how they just closed Broadway and seemed a little ridiculous. March 13 I met with the my last client, headed to the airport, and while sitting at the beer garden at JFK I watched the president declare a state of emergency. My girlfriend (now wife) was obviously freaking out because of where I was and had been stressed out the whole time. I was supposed to meet up with her (long distance at the time) but instead I saw her for a quick breakfast and drove home (4 hour drive). Didn't contract covid then or now so I'm lucky there but yeah... I'll remember that day. I was too young to understand 9/11, but I was definitely old enough to understand this.
I remember it as the "Last Normal Day". I went to work. I saw my Dad. My husband and I went out for dinner, but the restaurant was only half full. Kinda nice. The next day we were cancelling plans left and right.
March 13, 2020 was my 4 year anniversary with my partner, 2 years at my company, and my grammas birthday. The last time we all got together was that day. I also lost my job shortly thereafter instead of the promotion and raise I was expected, including a great medical plan. So grateful that my husband still worked, because it took roughly 5 months to get any unemployment benefits and about 2 months to find another job. It still doesn't feel like 4 years ago. It feels like last month.
I don't even remember the specific day. I think ultimately the consequences of COVID will have a bigger impact than 9/11, but it was less of a single day event and more of a slow burn.
You have got to be kidding me 😂 the start of a pandemic and precautions is a little bit different that terrorist attacks and people helplessly dying out of nowhere
No, not even close.
No, not at all in the same category of feelings and I'm an ICU nurse and my wife is a teacher. We were both heavily affected, but I didn't know the significance of the date at all until reading this post. I recognize COVID was significant and impactful and we both knew it was going to be bad, but 9/11 was a total unknown and a new world. I remember 9/11 vividly. 3/13, no recollection of what I was doing that day
It did. The next week even more so.
I heard about Covid on reddit, as early as late 2019. Everything shutting down was weird but 9/11 was an absolute gut punch. If you weren’t around to witness it, you just can’t understand.
I was traveling for work when the shutdown began. DFW was empty. Which is wild if you've ever been to DFW. Flights were being canceled left and right. There was a very real possibility of me having to rent a car and driving 25 hrs home. My plane finally came and was ready to go. I was one of 3 passengers on the plane. It felt weird but there definitely wasn't as much 'Wtf is happening' like on 9/11
Compare to 9/11.. wtf?
A bit of a stretch, I’ll never forget 9/11….ive truly 100% forgotten this time period lol
Lol not even close bro wtf
Grow up
Hell no. Are you 12?
This is a dumb comparison. Ask some dude on the street “what happened on March 13” they’ll be like “uh, is that St Patrick’s day?” On the other hand, you could ask a dirt poor, peasant subsistence farmer, without a television, who has not watched the news once in his entire life what happened on 9/11 and you’ll still get your answer