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Month: September 2025

COVID-19 Retrospective

COVID-19 Retrospective

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Do y’all remember that we had a pandemic? And that it was a seriously big deal, that had the world in a panic?

At the onset, there were overwhelmed health care systems. As it went on, overflows of bodies. Mass graves. People were scared. This new virus was killing at an accelerated rate.

I remember watching a dashboard of the spreading infection. Before it really hit the U.S., thinking – maybe they’ll do something to stop it. Maybe the authorities will figure their shit out and it won’t be so bad here.

Then the red dots started spreading on the U.S. part of the map. It dawned on me that no, there is no stopping this. I called my boss to tell him I wouldn’t come to the office any more, but would work from home (lucky me with my email laptop job), and hours later got a notification that was sent to the whole company: don’t come to work.

We were in lockdown.

Remember how we knew so little about how this “novel coronavirus” spread that we were spraying sanitizer everywhere? There was actually a rumor for a bit that people were becoming infected when they pumped gas. We kept gloves in our car for the gas station!

And the shortages as people stocked up. Supply chains were in crisis. Suddenly it was revealed that toilet paper was the essential commodity of civilized life. Medical supplies in particular were in short supply, to the point that the Governor of Maryland was hiding testing kits from the Feds. Can you believe that shit?

Was it all a massive overreaction?

That’s such an unfortunate word, IMO, because it implies there is some way to know what the exact correct reaction should have been. But of course there is no way to know that, just as there is no way to know what the outcomes would have been had we made different choices as a society.

What if there had been no lockdowns? There would have been different rates of sickness and mortality and different effects on unemployment and inflation. But would these outcomes have been preferable, even if one could come to agreement on preferences? One can speculate, form a theory, but one cannot test the theory because, by the nature of time and choice, the data are not there.

The simple truth is, leaders faced a high degree of uncertainty, and the glaring fact that, in the initial waves, COVID-19 was an extremely deadly contagion. It both spread easily and had a high mortality rate, and it’s no wonder we were all spooked.

Just consider this: in 2020, COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer. That’s insane for a disease that didn’t exist the year before. It’s hard to imagine what an “overreaction” would look like for such a thing. Please do click on that link and look a little closer. For one age cohort, the core of my generation, it was the leading cause of death in 2021. No wonder we drank so much.

I made this chart using our actual spending in 2020, I won’t deny it

I remember how much I blogged about coronavirus in those early years of the pandemic. As the emergency eased, officially declared over by President Biden in 2023, I mostly dropped the topic. In 2024, COVID-19 was no longer in the top 10 causes of death. Accidents and strokes had restored their respectable statuses under heart disease and cancer, the twin grim reapers awaiting us all in our advanced years.

But the disease is still with us, of course, and it is still dangerous. I caught COVID just last month, in fact. I immediately went on the antiviral PAXLOVID, because I do not want that nasty thing multiplying in my body.

SARS-COV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID, is not like influenza or the common cold. It gets into your system and it does damage everywhere. Long term damage that could lead to long COVID, or to some other condition down the road that reduces your lifespan. As one substacker explains it, catching COVID is like smoking cigarettes – you can keep doing it over and over, but you will pay for it in the long run.

Is the pandemic over anyways? There’s no end date given on Wikipedia’s helpful page of deadly pandemics, so I guess not. There COVID-19 sits, nowhere near the death toll of the Spanish flu, history’s GOAT pandemic, but catching up to the slow burn HIV/AIDS.

Luckily, the U.S. is a world leader in medical research. Right? Oh no...

The Old Ways

The Old Ways

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This isn’t a very deep post today, just some fun observations.

I am a domesticated creature who typically doesn’t go out very much. Also, I am unemployed, so I don’t have anywhere to go anyway. When everyone else in the household is away at work or at school, I do have one activity for exercise – walking about town, weather permitting (I should go to the gym, but that’s another story).

I live in a shabby little town in Pennsylvania, where there are just enough side streets to create walking circuits through the small neighborhoods that bracket either side of the busy main drag (the traffic is almost all going through town).

The main drag of Morgantown, PA

Most of Pennsylvania is small, dilapidated towns – well, that and forested mountains. That’s because of the state’s irregular geography, and its historical development, which has encouraged small, localized municipalities to spring up everywhere. These patterns have also suppressed economic development, hence the dilapidation. It’s an aesthetic. This is a land that embraces its weathered past.

The myriad muncipalities are typically “townships,” though the town where our address is located is simply a “Census designated area” within a township. Don’t ask me why. I’ve blogged about life here before, which is kind of like being in a liminal space between the DEI city and the MAGA country.

The point I wanted to make with this post is that when I’ve been out walking, multiple times now cars have slowed down, and the drivers have lowered their window to ask me for directions! Like, don’t they have a smartphone for navigational purposes? Apparently, not everyone does.

Not to stereotype here, but invariably the driver will be an older white person – a Boomer, I’m sure. Ok, maybe they could be a Gen Xer since our generation is now entering its early 60s, but I’m pretty sure they are Boomers. They might be looking at a piece of paper, presumably with the directions they were trying to follow written on them, but as often happens with that old fashioned approach, they wrote something down that turned out to be illegible. I’m making up a story here.

Of course, I am happy to help these lost drivers, and I always can, since I have a smartphone. Which the drivers would know, since my phone is always out, because as I walk I play a casual game called Pikmin Bloom. Some of us here embrace the new ways of doing things. I just thought it was interesting that there are still people out there following the old ways.

Reflections at the End of the World

Reflections at the End of the World

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Once more I am on the job hunt. So far, it doesn’t seem much different than in the past. There are positions out there for which I am qualified. I have registered successfully for unemployment compensation, as I have many times before in my life.

In my job searches, I am limiting myself to remote work. The convenience of it is too much to give up, if I don’t have to, and so far there have been multiple remote positions to apply for. But obviously, if the search drags on, I will have to cast my net wider and consider going back to commuting – perhaps only on certain days of the week, in the now common “hybrid” mode which combines working from home with working on site. The point is, I might not be so lucky as I was a couple years ago, when I easily transitioned from one remote job to another.

I worry, actually, that I might be really unlucky at this juncture. With insano-fascist-guy upending the American economy via his unhinged policies, the job market is in trouble. Companies facing the uncertainty of the times are freezing hiring. We might even be heading into a recessium. I’m almost 60 years old, not a good age to have my career suddenly stalled.

I recently wrote on my substack about the problem of “gerontocracy” – our political leadership skewing older than the population, and therefore being out of touch with the needs of the American people. I made the point that this is a bigger problem for Democrats than for Republicans, and helps explain the Republican rise to power. Currently my generation, the middle-aged generation, are the primary Trump supporters. Democrats are either the older generations on their way out, or younger Millennials.

A generational shift in power is surely going to be a fallout of this tumultuous social era. I can see – in the long term – MAGA burning out and the Millennials taking over with a more progressive agenda. At that point, Gen-X will be sidelined. With the demographic collapse making Social Security less sustainable, we will probably also be impoverished. There won’t be a lot of sympathy for us, especially if we’re seen as the ones repsonsible for the worst of what is to come.

Those are some depressing thoughts, I know. It’s just where my head is at right now. It would be just like my generation grow old just as the gerontocracy was being eliminated. Another boat missed.

I’m going to take advantage of the time I have been given to do more writing. Maybe some political activism.

And I would appreciate more subscribers to my Substack if you can: https://stevebarrera.substack.com/

Peace out.