How much do you remember about the pandemic? Really remember?
The calendars have flipped, we are now into 2024, and a series of grim anniversaries loom. Though we now know that COVID-19 had been circulating for some time — at least weeks and possibly longer — before it was detected, the first major developments in the pandemic to get much public attention were in January 2020, four years ago. It started with strange reports of a new pneumonia in China, progressed to the shocking sudden isolation of the entire city of Wuhan, and then spread rapidly (quite literally) from there. Despite all those early assurances that the “lessons of SARS” would protect us and that “the risk to Canada was low,” it wasn’t long before the virus was here, setting off a process that would ultimately kill tens of thousands of Canadians.
That kind of stuff, most of us remember, no doubt. The grand outlines of how it unfolded. But what about the personal details? Everyone will have their own little moments of recall. For me, among many of the early memories of the confused first few weeks is a very specific one of leaving my house and walking up to nearby Eglinton Avenue, typically one of Toronto’s most jammed east-west roads, running right through midtown. It was rush hour, probably about 5 p.m. And I stood in the middle of the avenue. Right in the middle. And I looked east and west, as far as the eye could see. There wasn’t a single vehicle of any kind travelling down one of Toronto’s busiest roads at the start of what should have been the nightmare commuting hour that, in normal times, totally jams traffic on all the side streets in my neighbourhood.
It was eerie, to put it mildly. No cars on the road. No planes overhead, either — air travel had ground to a halt. I knew better, but it really did feel as though the world had been emptied of people, like in some kind of sci-fi or horror movie. Knowing that all the people were still out there, carefully buttoned up inside their homes, some of them no doubt watching me stand in the road, somehow made it feel worse.
There are other memories I could turn to, and some are more lighthearted than that. (My then-much-younger daughter commented to me one day that her favourite TV show was “breaking news,” which was a sign I needed to stop obsessively absorbing news updates in front of the kids.) But I have found in recent months and maybe even years that many of my memories are fading.
This is to be expected. The passage of time alone will do that; unpleasant memories, especially, are prone to being forgotten. This came up a few months ago during a chat with friends. We all struggled to remember specific details of the shared experience. Each of us had some tangible memory (or a few of them), but most of the rest was a hazy blur. The exhaustion we all experienced at the time no doubt contributed to that. But there might be something more basic than that — we not only “edit” our memories as time goes on, but also appear to do it to retroactively align our views of the present moment with how we choose to recall the past.
The Toronto Star’s Alex Boyd had a fascinating article about exactly this late last year. Boyd cited both Canadian and European research that found that people’s memories of the pandemic, including their own memories of how they felt during the pandemic about issues like vaccination and public-health restrictions, have shifted over time. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that people have reconsidered the events and concluded, with hindsight, that more or less should have been done. This is something else: with the benefit of time, we’re changing how we remember feeling then.
It’s not a huge swing. Memories do seem to stay largely consistent, the research cited by Boyd found. But one’s current political views on things like vaccines and vax passports did observably skew how we remembered feeling about those things at the time. That is fascinating, and as Boyd notes, not something we can assume is limited to the pandemic! In high stressful and politically polarized times, like the ones we all currently live in, we are probably all constantly selectively editing or “curating” not just how we remember behaving in the past, but also how we remember feeling and what we remember believing, too.
Boyd’s article was fascinating, since it suggests there’s some real underlying truth to what I’ve otherwise just considered to be a personal judgment on human nature. Since we are all the protagonists in our own life stories, I’ve long accepted that all of us will remember things in a maximally favourable light. In my personal life, no doubt I’m as guilty of this as anyone.
In my professional life, though, I don’t have that luxury. My views on the pandemic, and about a billion other matters, are archived in places like the National Post, Maclean’s, The Line, and, of course, right here at TVO Today. I’ve never kept a diary or journal, but my work functions as such.
I’m grateful for that — an archive of one’s own work is useful for a lot of reasons. But it sometimes makes for strange reading. As the four-year anniversary of the beginning of all of this approached, I went back and began reading some of what I was writing at the very outset. It’s sobering, but worth remembering.
To forget, or to at least let the passage of time rub some of the hard edges off unpleasant recollections, is human — a necessary part of moving on after an upsetting event. It’s also how we get ourselves into the same kind of problems over and over. We should all remember how we reacted four years ago and during the years after. Perhaps it’ll help us, or some future generation, do better next time.
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