Recalling heroism, fear 4 years after Covid-19 pandemic – Buffalo News

I was there, where no one wanted to be in 2020.

Right about this time four years ago, my colleague Sharon Cantillon, a longtime Buffalo News photographer, reached out to ask if I would accompany her into hospital intensive care units, which would soon be overrun with people suffering and dying from the then-novel coronavirus, which we would all soon be calling Covid-19.

Journalists go places where others cant and then tell the story. Sometimes thats on a red carpet or into the White House. This time, it was on the front lines of the battle against the

I said yes, quickly but not easily. Covid was new, hot and scary. No vaccines existed, nor did any significant immunity. If our bodies were exposed to the virus, our immune systems could respond with confusion and alarm, slamming into overdrive and leaving us deathly ill. (You can interpret deathly to be figurative or literal. Depending on the person, either is true.)

Doctors hadnt yet learned how to handle it. Elected leaders were warning us to stay home. Stay safe was a common refrain. We would soon be socializing over video calls. Ordering takeout was chic. Grocery workers were noted for their bravery on the front line. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists and respiratory therapists in hospitals? We started calling them heroes and meaning it.

When Sharon asked me to join her, I felt the only natural answer was yes. The charge from my editors when I took this job with The News five years earlier was to spend time with people and in places that are hard to reach, to spend time digging for stories and taking readers into places they arent likely to go.

In early 2020, I thought to myself: This might be the most important writing you ever do.

Achieving understanding during the age of Covid is an elusive endpoint. The pandemic didnt simply change us. It transformed us in ways well be unraveling for decades. It altered our relationship with work, school and each other. It sometimes changed where we live, how we live and how we socialize. Researchers have studied and debated how the pandemic has affected our mental health on a broad scale: Look closely, and youll find reports showing the tripling of depression rates juxtaposed against a major review of more than 12 dozen studies claiming the impact is little.

But mental health is both an individual and ever-changing dynamic, so the question is: Are you, or the people closest to you, handling stress differently? Do people seem a little less patient or understanding? That may be because our collective empathy has dropped. According to a study conducted in 2022 by the United Way of the National Capital Area, Americans considered themselves less empathetic a couple years into the pandemic than we were in 2019. The national average was a 14% drop from 2019 to 2022, with millennials reporting the steepest fall (19%).

Everyday medical decisions like vaccination often mutated into political statements, with blue voting blocs embracing the shots while red states and regions resisted it, even though the vaccines were developed under the leadership of the Trump administration, and former President Donald Trump himself was vaccinated. A study published in September 2022 by the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed Covid-19 death rates in Ohio and Florida and found that more Republicans died than Democrats.

The pandemic is done, but Covid-19 is here to stay. How do we make sense of that? We spoke with a series of experts to find out.

From March 2020 to the end of 2021, the average excess death rate for Republicans was 76% higher than for Democrats. (Excess deaths is a term epidemiologists use to describe the number of deaths above what is statistically expected.) The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available, wrote researchers Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Jason L. Schwartz.

The deeply red state of Mississippi had the highest childhood vaccination rate pre-pandemic, but ranked among the lowest states for Covid-19 vaccinations.

Here they are, doing great on vaccination, pre-Covid, said Gale M. Sinatra, who is co-author with Barbara K. Hofer of Science Denial: Why it Happens and What to Do About It. Then Covid becomes politicized.

Nurse Eman Omar cares for a patient in the Covid intensive care unit at Buffalo General Medical Center in April 2020, when medical science was struggling to control the often-deadly virus.

Sinatra, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, pointed out in an interview last year that the Los Angeles region has a lot of liberal and progressive people who are into eating organic and no genetically modified foods and all of that. They were very anti-vax for childhood vaccination and some of them were also anti-vax for Covid, but some of them flipped in the other direction because it became this politically divided issue, and they took the Covid vaccine.

Though politics underlined many peoples choices, the more pervasive and frightening issue became misinformation and disinformation. The electorate has a voice and politicians change. We can choose our leaders. Thats how its supposed to be.

But during the pandemic, people started choosing their facts.

We didnt know a lot about Covid in the beginning, Sinatra said. There were serious questions about it that infectious disease doctors didnt know yet. So without good information, everybody turns to the internet because everybody is home. That combination was like throwing gasoline on an already blazing fire of misinformation on the internet, and it just exploded.

In this installment of Pandemic Lessons, we explore the state of our yearslong battle against Covid-19 and examine whether weve managed to recapture normalcy.

The kindling of that forest fire of misinformation was crackling years before anyone knew of Covid-19, but the onset of the pandemic ignited an explosion.

When I told my wife four years ago about my plan to report from inside hospitals, she was supportive. A bit hesitant? Maybe, but she didnt show it. More than anything, she was practical. We made a plan similar to what medical professionals were doing at the time: When I came home, she would open and then close the garage; I would strip off my outer layers, toss them in the laundry, then immediately shower. I wrapped my hand-held recorder in plastic and left my notebook in the garage, trying to minimize any chance of those threatening, mysterious Covid particles from getting into the house and infecting my wife or daughter.

Looking back, and knowing the facts we do now, not every bit of that was necessary. My recorder was unlikely to be a vessel for transmission, for example, and my notebook was unlikely to contaminate my entire house. But we were operating on what we knew, and what we knew was this: I was meeting medical professionals who were resolved but worn, and patients who were very sick. I watched a woman die. I met a man who was hospitalized for more than a month, had nightmarish visions of moaning corpses after being kept alive on a ventilator, and only wanted to make it home for his sons third birthday. (He did.)

Nurse Shawn Covell hangs sedatives and pain medication for a Covid patient as respiratory therapist Nick Logiudice, right, stands by at Buffalo General Medical Center in April 2020. The spread of misinformation became a frightening issue during the pandemic.

I met a nurse who kept newspaper clippings of her patients obituaries, a husband-wife duo who both worked as respiratory therapists, meaning they spent every working day close to peoples noses and mouths, where Covid camped out. I met doctors who made it their personal mission to bring vaccines to neighborhoods, communities and even countries where they werent easily accessible. I spent time with the secretary of Health and Human Services. I began a texting relationship with the former U.S. surgeon general. People like Dr. Tom Russo and Dr. John Sellick, the two Buffalo-based infectious disease experts whose voices have been most prominent in these parts, were (and remain) on speed dial.

I wrote about masks and shots, and have a collection of emails and voicemails in which people who didnt like facts masked their own identities and took shots at me. I gained readers. I lost friends.

I hope to never have to do it again. I would, but who would ever want to go through that again?

And honestly, now that most of the world (including me) lives life unmasked and gathers freely, it feels like a fever dream. That either means were all adaptable and able to move back into our old ways comfortably, or we all forget quite easily.

Follow Tim OShei on Twitter @timoshei .

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Recalling heroism, fear 4 years after Covid-19 pandemic - Buffalo News