One Year of Covid

Photo Credit: Me. This was taken five days into lockdown last March. The college students had gone home and the wild turkeys immediately took over. I, for one, welcomed our new gobbling overlords.

This week marked a somber anniversary: one week since the Covid pandemic, and the life changes that came along with it, hit America. Buzzfeed has an excellent oral history of March 11 as a particular turning point, but I think back to that entire week as when we collectively realized life was changing and wouldn’t go back to normal anytime soon. It’s things we all remember, like Tom Hanks testing positive, Broadway going dark, and the NBA suspending the rest of the season. But it’s small individual things too, in my case debating whether or not we should go out to dinner for my birthday (we did, and I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since) or learning the next morning that someone in my office building had tested positive to the virus and I’d probably been exposed.

I wrote about the pandemic 11 times last year, and this week I spent some time re-reading that content. The posts together make for an interesting history of Covid-related disinformation and extremism. This week seemed like a good time to revisit the effects that disinformation and right-wing extremism had on America’s pandemic year.

I first wrote about the virus in February, when we were still calling Coronavirus an epidemic, and it was something happening elsewhere, not really in the US as of yet. But the disinformation and conspiracies were already cropping up online, especially in far-right communities. There were also…