By Bonnie Kristian, The Week

The COVID-19 pandemic began, for me, on Tuesday, March 10, 2020.

I’d first written about “the novel coronavirus,” as we were calling it, in late February, when Carnevale ended early in Venice. The disease felt distant then; my husband and I had bought our bucket of lentils, but we didn’t seriously anticipate more than a couple months’ disruption. After all, there had been epidemics before — SARS, Ebola, that other respiratory thing that wasn’t SARS — which never seemed to reach daily life for the vast majority of Americans, us included.

So on Sunday, March 8, we went to church as usual. I joked about COVID on Instagram. But by the next morning, we learned multiple COVID cases had been confirmed in our state. Sports cancellations started. Restaurants began to close. The World Health Organization declared a pandemic that Wednesday. A week later, our governor shuttered schools “for at least eight days.” I guess this is a real thing, we said to our friends. I guess it’s happening.

And so it did. Today we find ourselves at the start of the third year of COVID, measured by that mark, with a strange mishmash of restrictions and norms and an acute new crisis in Europe drawing our attention away from the chronic one here. The looming question now is not whether the pandemic will happen but how it will end — or if it has ended already? — or if it can end at all? Will we keep the rules we made forever?

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