The Beginning of the End of Covid
Full, cheery pubs are coming soon.
On Saturday, fifteen months and two days after last I drank a pint of beer indoors, I returned for another. The pandemic is not over, exactly. Like so much else about Covid, my assumptions about how the crisis would end were wrong. There will be no single moment when we all agree the danger has passed. Unlike the way it started, when health agencies declared Covid a pandemic and governments shut services down, authorities warn that the virus will just hang around for months, or possibly years. The jarring, clearly articulated moment of onset will be juxtaposed by a slow decline.
Yet last week we did pass some major benchmarks, and the consequence is that “normal” life, whatever that looks like in the wake of a global health crisis, can return. By coincidence, the two-week waiting period following my second shot ended Saturday and I returned to Old Town Brewing for a pint with owner Adam Milne. That’s where I had my last indoor pint, and it seemed like a fitting ceremony to mark the end of the active phase. For me, having that pint indoors has always been the clear, bright definition for what normal would look like.
Officially Speaking
The CDC offered the most important announcement of this change last Thursday.
“Anyone who is fully vaccinated can participate in indoor and outdoor activities — large or small — without wearing a mask or physically distancing,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said. “If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic…. We have all longed for this moment — when we can get back to some sense of normalcy.”
As of Saturday, the CDC reported that 154.4 million Americans had received at least one shot, or 60% of adults over 18. A bit more than 120 million are fully vaccinated—47% of the adult population. The rate of daily vaccinations slowed for awhile but seems to be picking up again as the unvaccinated see the social benefits of receiving the shot. Adolescents over 12 have been cleared to receive the vaccine, and kids over two should be cleared by the fall. The vaccines seem to handle variants well, and although officials are tracking breakthrough infections for the vaccinated, the resulting sickness is, in the vast majority of cases, mild or absent.
The seven-day average for new infections was 31,800 last week—the lowest since June last year. Daily deaths dropped to the low 600s, the lowest at any time since the outbreak really got rolling. These numbers should continue to decline as the vaccine rates rise. Covid may not vanish, but it appears we have developed the tools to manage it like we do the flu or other once-serious viruses.
Adam Milne and Van Havig unmasked, Saturday, May 15, 2021.
A Glorious Session
The week of March 9, 2020 was dizzying. On Monday, the gravity of the pandemic was beginning to dawn on us, and when the NBA canceled its season on March 11th, it came slamming home. It didn’t take a government proclamation to keep people out of restaurants and bars—by the end of that week, their traffic was down 80-90%. In my foolishness, I was encouraging people to get out and support their local breweries—another citizen having trouble assessing risk. I followed my own advice and visited Old Town Brewing on Friday the 13th (that date was just a little too on-the-nose, isn’t it?), hugging and chatting up Adam. The next day I awoke with a sore throat and for the first time I understood the gravity of going out during a pandemic. Thinking I may have infected an entire bar was a sobering experience. (It was a cold.)
Adam, of course, has become a stalwart in my Coronavirus Diaries series, detailing his real-time struggles trying to keep two brewpubs afloat during a pandemic. I invited others from that group to join us, and Van Havig was able to. We sat together, technically inside the pub though next to an open roll-up window. We took off our masks and we sat next to each other. We ordered pints of Old Town’s award-winning pilsner. At first we talked about Covid and I recounted my own story. Pretty soon muscle memory kicked in, however, and the evening turned into to that thing we have so missed over the past fifteen months. A long session over beers, talking about whatever. The conversation spiraled through topics, touching on subjects as diverse as Dungeons and Dragons, the Oregon cannabis industry, and pinot noir.
Which is exactly typical.
Most sessions at the pub are opportunities to connect, to let our minds interlace with each other, not march through an agenda. The point is the connection, the beer and pub are the setting, and the conversation is the method. Interacting with each other is critical part of being mentally healthy. It is the kind of “normal” we lost over the past year, and in its absence we discovered how precious such simple moments are. It doesn’t have to be a pub; any venue that creates space for that unscheduled time works. (Pubs, of course, are an especially effective setting.)
If we think of normal as the way we lived in February 2020, we have a long way to go. We’re going to be contending with masks, vaccine passports, school interruptions, childhood vaccinations, and the fallout from the last year for months to come. Periodically, certain counties may have to restrict regular business because of flare-ups. We’ll have a continued debate about vaccines themselves. And of course, other countries are still in the dangerous, lethal stage. A Covid-free normal is years away.
And yet something has changed. For the first time in 15 months, many of us can safely sit together in a pub drinking beer. Restoring that simple act and the joys it brings makes all the difference in the world. For me, a return to “normal” has always had a clear, specific meaning: that moment I can sit in a pub drinking beer with friends. For me and the half of the country who’s been vaccinated, we’re there. We may not be Covid-free, but that’s not the critical milestone. Instead, we’re seeing regular life come back, and we’re finally getting to see each other in person rather than through a computer screen. What a glorious thing it is to simply sit with other people.
I look forward to having a pint with as many of you as I can—