Tag: Pandemic Diary

Pandemic Diary: Some Thoughts on Three Years of Pandemic Living (And Why COVID-19 Is Not Quite Finished With Us Yet)

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash

The WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11th, 2020, and the world entered lockdown. And now, three years later, I wanted to pause and reflect a little bit on how my life has changed since then. I’ve been working on a rough draft of this blogpost for several months, picking it up and putting it away again, and now seems like a good time to finally publish it.

I had a bit of heads-up, before COVID-19 was on most people’s radar, because I had been watching and preparing for an influenza pandemic. So, it was on January 24th, 2020 that I wrote my first blogpost about a virus which was circulating in and around the city of Wuhan, China. I wrote:

I’m a weird person. (But then, if you’ve been following this blog at all, we’ve already established that fact pretty firmly.) Throughout my life, I have had a somewhat lamentable tendency to go off on weird tangents.

And, back around 2006, my tangent was bird flu. I became obsessed with following and discussing the latest information about the H5N1 avian flu virus with other flu preppers (a.k.a. “flubies”), which for a time looked as though it would develop into a global pandemic. (I just checked, and I still remember my username and password from the FluTrackers.com discussion forum!)

Me and my fellow flubies were constantly worrying, analyzing, and obsessing over the latest case data and news reports.

At the time, I used my very rudimentary PhotoShop skills to create and share some funny pictures with my fellow “flubies” on the FluTrackers.com discussion forum, in an effort to inject some levity into what was a grave and potentially life-threatening global situation. I firmly believe that a sense of humour is a sense of perspective; if you can laugh about (or at) something, it necessarily means that you can look at it with a bit of external perspective. Thankfully, H5N1 bird flu turned out to be somewhat of a bust (although millions of chickens and other birds have been killed, and even as recently as last month, there have been reports of strains of H5N1 influenza jumping from birds to mammals, such as mink and seals).

However, as everybody knows, we were not so lucky this time around with COVID-19, and it was definitely not a laughing matter, either. The very next day, January 25th 2020, I posted my very first coronavirus update on the RyanSchultz.com blog. I felt very strongly, as a librarian who works at a university science library, that I should connect you to the best, most up-to-date sources of information, to help you make the best decisions. And, from time to time, I would hijack my blog to continue to provide the best information I could as the pandemic spread. Many of my blog readers were confused and upset by the sudden change in direction!

Because I have underlying health conditions which put me at a higher risk of a severe case of COVID-19 if I were to become infected, I am vaccinated (6 times now, including both bivalent boosters!), I still wear facemasks indoors in public spaces, and I still avoid leaving my apartment. I let my guard down rarely, and I have (to my knowledge) not been infected with COVID—but it’s been at a cost.

After three years of pandemic living, I am an extrovert-turned-introvert (or, perhaps more accurately, a social person turned anti-social). I find it ironic indeed that my passionate hobby and research area—virtual worlds, social VR, and virtual reality—allows me to connect with other people from the safety of my own home or office! The only times I leave my apartment are:

  • going to work (my university still has an indoor facemask mandate in public and shared spaces, although I can take my mask off when I close my office door);
  • going to doctor’s appointments (I talk to my psychiatrist via Zoom still, though);
  • visiting my mother and stepfather in their lifelease condo across town; and
  • picking up the groceries I ordered online via the Walmart website (I always schedule this for Sunday mornings between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., to avoid other people!). In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times that I have actually set foot in a supermarket over the past three years.

Other than that, I stay at home, which has been the biggest change in my life. I used to be one of those people who would often go out to cafés and restaurants, either alone or with friends. Now, instead of going out to eat at restaurants, I cook for myself at home, and this is perhaps the most firmly established new habit that I picked up over the past three years. I am far from a chef, but I have simple tastes, and I now feel much more confident in the kitchen!

One silver lining of the pandemic is that I finally learned how to cook! Photo by Alyson McPhee on Unsplash

While I have met up with friends at outdoor restaurant patios during Winnipeg’s all-too-brief summer, I must confess that I still have not embraced indoor restaurant dining (a coworker, who had a similar rule, broke it only once, and came down with a case of COVID). Again, I can count on one hand the number of times that I have taken off my facemask to eat something indoors with other people: a catered brainstorming session with my coworkers; and the first face-to-face meeting of my arts and entertainment group in 3 years just last month, where we had a potluck.

Even my tastes in music seem to have changed because of the pandemic. Often under stress and struggling with both anxiety and insomnia, I would seek out ways to calm and recenter myself. One day in 2020, I was browsing in a virtual store in Second Life, where the store owner had set the parcel’s audio stream to something called Calm Radio. I was so taken with the peaceful music, and the soothing voice of the woman promoting the service, that I sprung for a subscription! (In fact, I am listening to the Spa station—one of dozens of expertly-curated stations on Calm Radio—as I type this.)

I realize that I can’t keep my guard up forever, of course. I am still living in a kind of limbo, a form of suspended animation, in many respects. And I find myself wondering when things are going to get back to “normal” (and even how to define what “normal” is). While other people have basically decided that the pandemic is over, the fact remains that millions of people have died from COVID-19 (well over one million Americans alone, a statistic which staggers me). Millions more people have been disabled with long COVID, some after only mild initial infections.

This is something that you can’t just shrug and move on from, no matter how much you want to get on with life and pretend nothing serious happened. I am absolutely terrified of getting the “brain fog” associated with long COVID, because I make a living with my brain! And I already have asthma; I certainly don’t want COVID to fuck up my lungs, either! The coronavirus has definitely made me think a lot about my quality of life.

The pandemic also forced me to think about my own mortality, and start preparing for my inevitable death. I have finalized my will with a lawyer my financial planner recommended to me, although I do still need to visit a funeral home to make arrangements for my cremation, and set up a spot at the cemetery, where my final ashes will rest. But when you know people who have passed away from COVID (like my best friend’s 92-year-old mother, last November), it is a powerful motivator to get things like this taken care of, before you need it. It’s just one less thing for your family to deal with when you do die.

Early hopes that a one-and-done (or two-and-done, etc.) vaccination, which would protect against all strains of COVID-19, have unfortunately failed to materialize, as the coronavirus continues to mutate, and people get reinfected. I suspect that we are going to be facing a situation with COVID much like the flu, where you get an annual or semiannual shot which is developed against whatever the predominant strains of the virus are. Scientists are also learning more about how a COVID-19 infection attacks the body (e.g. microclotting), which hopefully should lead to new and improved treatments and prevention measures.

Many of us are still dealing with the situation day by day, and the future seems uncertain. Things even feel a bit precarious to me at times, and I still sometimes struggle with anxiety, insomnia, and depression. There are days when I have problems with motivation, both at home and at work. I feel angry and discouraged that something as science-backed as COVID vaccination was turned into a polarizing political issue. A crisis that should have brought us together seems to have highlighted the divisiveness within society, and just how selfish some people can be. And, of course, many of the ripple effects from the pandemic (such as supply-chain problems) are still impacting us all.

Whether you choose to believe it or not, the pandemic is not over.

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

New Year, Now What? Taking Time to Figure Out My Next Steps for this Blog

Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

Happy New Year! Time for an update.

As you might have noticed, my formerly feverish pace of blogging has slowed to a glacial crawl lately. There are a number of reasons for that, among them the fact that I am extremely busy with my full-time paying job as an academic librarian, where among many other projects I am juggling, I am working on a project to set up a virtual reality lab in one of my university’s libraries.

But another reason is that I am tired. Bone tired, after almost three years of pandemic living. I also turn 59 this month, and I have had my fair share of health issues (Type II diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, obesity, etc.). Because I have these underlying health issues which would put me at risk of a severe case of COVID-19 if I were to become infected, I have basically upended my former life in an effort to stay safe and healthy.

I am quintuple-vaccinated, I still practice elaborate social distancing wherever possible, and I wear a facemask when I am indoors in public spaces. I have a rule I have not broken in almost three years now: no indoor restaurant dining! (I do meet up with friends during the summer to enjoy some outdoor patio dining, however. Obviously, that’s not an option the rest of the year, up here in wintry Winnipeg!)

Thankfully, my employer (the University of Manitoba) is listening to the scientists, and still has imposed an indoor facemask mandate on both its campuses for this Winter term—a lone island of sanity in my city, I fear (of course, healthcare settings like hospitals and my doctor’s and dentist’s offices still require masks).

I really only leave my apartment to go to work, visit my parents at their life lease condo across town, and pick up my prescriptions at my local pharmacy (where tomorrow I will be getting my Pfizer bivalent booster shot!).

I have also gotten into the habit of ordering my groceries online via Walmart, then picking them up Sunday mornings between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., when it is not busy. They load up my car, while I stand and watch (masked of course), and I drive away; it works well, and I see no reason to change it. During the last three years, I have set foot into a grocery store exactly once.

Anyway, long story short, I’m not sure where I’m going right now, and how this blog fits into everything else that I’m doing. So I am going to take some time to figure things out. In the meantime, there won’t be very much blogging, I’m afraid.

When I do have something to announce, I will let you know! Thank you all for your patience.

Pandemic Diary, February 20th, 2022: Everybody’s Getting COVID-19 (Even the Queen!)

Today is officially day 707 since I first began working from home for my university on March 16th, 2020, and the number of days that I have been back on campus since then is still in the single digits. (I will finally be returning to campus full-time on February 28th, 2022, when all the University of Manitoba Libraries will reopen. The university has a mask mandate and a vaccine mandate, going so far as to deregister those students who have not uploaded proof of vaccination to a special website. They are not messing around!)

Here in my home province of Manitoba, our government has started to lift the public health restrictions that have been in place, despite the still-alarmingly high number of hospitalizations and ICU admissions of COVID-19 patients. A Feb. 11th provincial government news release stated:

New public health orders will come into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 15 that will move all of Manitoba to the Yellow (Caution) level under the Pandemic Response System. Capacity limits will be eliminated in venues such as restaurants, licensed premises, entertainment venues, indoor and outdoor sporting events and casinos, as well as gatherings at private residences. Capacity limits will be removed for outdoor public gatherings but will be limited to 50 people indoors unless proof of vaccination is required. Young people ages 12 to 17 participating in indoor sports and recreation will no longer be required to provide proof of vaccination or recent testing. There are no changes to retail and personal services.

As of Feb. 15, close contacts of a person who tests positive for COVID-19 will no longer be required to self-isolate. Public health continues to recommend self-isolation for people who live in a household with others who have symptoms or tested positive for COVID-19 but it will no longer be required.

Many people (myself included) are questioning why the Manitoba government is moving so quickly, and seemingly against the advice of scientists, doctors, and public health experts, in lifting these restrictions. Premier Heather Stefanson has announced that Manitoba will, as of March 15, 2022 remove all mask requirements and all other COVID-19 restrictions, a decision that is also proving to be divisive. Some people are fully in support, while others feel it is still to risky.

As for me, I have essentially barricaded myself in my apartment since the start of the Omicron wave of the pandemic, only venturing out to visit my mother and stepfather (who also rarely leave their life-lease condo), and to pick up the groceries I order online via Walmart, picking a timeslot to avoid contact with other people as much as possible (Sunday mornings between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m.). I have also been wearing an N95 facemask every time I step out of my apartment, and practicing elaborate social distancing as much as possible.

Yes, I am so sick and tired of all this after seven hundred and seven days. Yes, I want this to be over as badly as the next person (although just declaring yourself “over COVID” ain’t going to make it happen!). But I honestly don’t believe that the pandemic is finished with us just yet, not when so much of the world’s population (especially in the poorer, Third World countries) hasn’t been vaccinated yet. There’s still too much chance of the coronavirus mutating again like it did with Omicron, and causing us to shut down all over again.

But I still want to evade the SARS-CoV-2 virus as long as possible, especially at a time when so many other people are getting sick, and Manitoba’s healthcare system is stretched to the limit! Because of my underlying health conditions (obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, and asthma), even though I am triple-vaccinated, I still worry that I would have a severe case of COVID-19 if I were to become infected.

Today, my mother telephoned me to tell me the news that I have been expecting but dreading: two people among my family in Alberta have developed COVID-19. Fortunately, although both are sick, they are not seriously ill, and are thankfully not experiencing any breathing difficulties. (In both cases, it has been like a very bad case of the flu, with muscle aches and pains. One has a sore throat.)

I know that eventually I will catch COVID-19. My goal in 2022 is to avoid getting COVID-19 as long as I possibly can, so that when I do get it, every single possible healthcare support is readily available to me, including a good supply of anti-viral medications like Paxlovid, just in case I do land up in a worst-case scenario. It is extremely unlikely that I will be in that situation, but I still so worry.

And if that means that I will still be face masking and social distancing long after other people stop (and getting most of my socialization needs met via social VR and virtual worlds!), then that is a price I am willing to pay for my own peace of mind.

Photo by Tai’s Captures on Unsplash

Postscript: My friend John Facetimed me this afternoon and told me that CBC news has announced that Queen Elizabeth II has tested positive for COVID-19. I have seen pictures of the Queen looking so frail recently, so I am concerned:

She reminds me so much of my own beloved grandmother, who coincidentally was also named Elizabeth (she passed away well before the pandemic started). I would not call myself a monarchist by any stretch, but the Queen is still Canada’s head of state, and I wish her a speedy recovery.

Everybody’s getting COVID-19, it seems. It’s just a matter of when, and how bad.

Stay safe and stay healthy!

Pandemic Diary, January 26th, 2022: Why I Am So Goddamned Angry

My father (God rest his soul; he died when I was just 21) had a temper. There were times when I was on the receiving end of that anger, and they were terrifying. I swore that I would never become him, but then I fell into a different, but perhaps predictable, trap: both suppressing my anger (which led to my lifelong, chronic, clinical depression, a dragon I still battle today), and projecting my anger onto other people (becoming a compulsive people pleaser, particularly to bosses and other authority figures). Neither tactic helped me.

It wasn’t until I had a textbook-classic case of hit-the-wall burnout, circa 1997-1999, when I had to come face to face with the fact that how I was dealing (or more accurately, not dealing) with what was making me angry was undermining my life and, essentially, killing me. That painful realization was the start of a long journey of healing, which is still unfinished.

I would get into my subcompact car and drive around Winnipeg’s Perimeter Highway, screaming myself hoarse in rage, with all the windows rolled up. I had inherited a brown corduroy recliner of my father’s after his death, and I would kneel in front of it and beat the seat cushion with my fists in rage, until they bled. And I did a LOT of therapy, talking things through with the psychiatrists who prescribed different kinds of antidepressants to help me heal from my debilitating waves of depression, my suppressed anger. I also talked with other counsellors and wise people through the years. It all helped.

And, for the most part, it worked. Today, when something happens that make me angry, I can usually respond by actually feeling and being aware of my anger, within a reasonable time frame (minutes and hours, not left to fester for weeks, months, or even years). I can feel appropriately angry, identify what (or whom) made me angry, try to parse the situation intelligently, and get some sort of handle on it. This is all progress, good progress.

But the fact remains that today, I am angry. Let me tell you why I am so goddamned angry. I’m going to create a list.

  • I am angry that, despite having had the foresight to see that a pandemic was coming (to the point that I began blogging about it, exactly two years ago!), and despite preparing logistically for such an eventuality for years (even stocking up on canned beans and rice and N95 masks!), that I was as mentally and emotionally unprepared as anybody else when the pandemic did strike. No amount of prepping can prepare you for the actual moment when the shit hits the fan.
  • I am angry that so many people refused to listen to me between January and March of 2020, when I was telling anybody and everybody who would listen that we needed to prepare, collectively and individually, for a pandemic. I confused and upset people when I took a blog which heretofore had been about social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse, and starting posting item after item after item about the pandemic. I wore myself out, and I honestly don’t know how many people were actually helped or convinced by that frenzy of posting.
  • I am angry—no, make that incandescent with rage—at all the people who chose to listen to the misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories regarding the pandemic and vaccination, attacking the very scientists and healthcare workers to which they should have been paying attention. I am furious that, at a time when we could have all pulled together for the public good, during a public health crisis, we as a society instead chose to descend into divisive, argumentative factions, and that diviseness only seems to be getting worse instead of better. Who the fuck thinks it is okay to assault hospital workers, or send people like Dr. Fauci death threats?!??
  • I am furious at the collective failure of all levels of government—national, provincial and state, municipal—to provide humane, science-based responses which could have prevented so much needless suffering, sickness, and death. I am angry at all the politicians during this current Omicron wave of the coronavirus pandemic who threw up their hands, and walked away from the people who looked to them for leadership, and instead gave empty sound bites. (Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson, I am looking at you. The next provincial election cannot come fast enough to toss your entire sorry government out on its asses.)
  • I am angry at how negatively my depression and anxiety have impacted my life, my career, and my beloved work on this blog and the Metaverse Newscast. I could have done so much better; I could have done so much more. The pandemic has just been beating the absolute motherfucking shit out of me lately, and I hate, hate, HATE that. Hate what two years of unrelenting stress and anxiety has done to me, hate what I have become as I barricade myself yet again in my apartment, practising elaborate social distancing when I do venture out, picking up my fucking groceries between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday from the pick-up at my local Walmart, standing well clear of the car while it was loaded up. I fucking hate it and I want to scream in frustration and rage, just as I had to scream out my anger at my father, only this time I don’t have a convenient target for that anger.

I am lying here, typing all this into my iPad, on the verge of angry tears which won’t come, which won’t break through. I am so angry of being scared and so angry of being tired, and frankly so angry and fed up with being angry. And yet, the situation calls for still more patience, more forbearance, and more forgiveness, than I can seem to find within myself. I’m not sure how much more I can stretch, today.

I am angry at every twist and turn and disappointment and heartbreak of this pandemic, and angry at all the collective suffering, pain, and chaos it has caused.

I am just plain angry.

I’m angry

And maybe that’s all I can do today, is just be angry. And perhaps use that anger as a fuel, to somehow, someway, propel me into tomorrow. To a day when I’m not so angry.