Pandemic Reflections
This Past Year Has Humbled Me
I’ve made mistakes. We all have.
I’m a bit of a know-it-all. It comes with the territory of the job — I literally find out interesting things and then explain them to other people for a living. Depending on your view, I’m either the most fun at parties or the least fun at parties. At one event a few years ago, a good friend made the rule that if anyone had a fact-based question, they had to ask me first because I invariably (thought I) had the answer. It was the best night of my life.
With Covid-19, all of that came crashing down. I knew nothing. No one did. In late February, some co-workers at Medium asked me how concerned I was about the new virus. I gave a middle-of-the-road, noncommittal answer, probably comparing it to the flu and urging people to wash their hands — as if I knew anything about what lay ahead. Team Elemental were some of the last people to still go into the office in early March, trying to put on a reassuring act for the rest of the company that everything was still okay (everything was not okay).
My only consolation about how incredibly wrong I was about the situation is that a highly regarded epidemiologist who has been a prominent voice throughout the pandemic told me on March 4 that he had happily just put his 95-year-old mother on an…
