Mar 13, 2021 3 min read

It was about this time one year ago that people started hunkering down.

Frantic trips were made to grocery stores. Workplaces were emptied. Businesses closed their doors and events were canceled.

Since almost no one alive had ever been through a deadly worldwide pandemic, there was no telling how long our routine lives would be waylaid. A month? Two months? Maybe until the summer?

Some prognosticators pointed out in March 2020, though, that we were merely in the “foothills” of COVID-19, and we still had mountains to climb before the virus would be vanquished. Turns out they were correct.

There were also warnings 12 months ago that more than 100,000 Americans could die of the virus, and that seemed shocking. That’s almost twice as many Americans who died in the long and misbegotten Vietnam War. One year later, 540,000 Americans have died from the virus, almost twice the number of Americans who perished in World War II. Somewhere around 30 million Americans have been infected – at least that we know of – and some of them have endured long-lasting and debilitating illness. Chronic fatigue, kidney problems and strokes have been reported. Around the world, more than 2.6 million people have died due to COVID-19 and 117 million have been infected.

What many hoped would be a weeks-long inconvenience has turned into a year-long siege.

There is some room for hope that we will soon be able to put the worst of the pandemic behind us. The number of cases and deaths has been declining in recent weeks, though there is abundant room for concern that relaxed restrictions and more contagious variants will cause yet another spike. And there are now vaccines from three different manufacturers available in the United States, including a single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson that promises to speed up the pace of vaccination, and get people living in more remote locations vaccinated, since it does not require the extreme cold that is necessary to store the two-dose vaccines that have been produced by Pfizer and Moderna.

Thanks to the growing number of Americans who have been vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidance days ago that recommends people who have been fully vaccinated can gather together in households without masks or social distancing. That is a heartening development for anyone who has been separated from friends or family, and is a step on our road back to normal.

Things are looking up, that’s for sure. But we still have some distance to travel. As health experts have been saying repeatedly, we still need to keep wearing masks, keep our distance and get vaccinated when we have the opportunity. If we remain vigilant, we’ll be able to conquer COVID-19.

Dr. Atif Saeed, an infectious disease doctor with the Washington Health System, pointed out that the sooner we get COVID under control, “we can get back to that normalcy that we desire. We have to do our part in preventing the illness in the community and our families so we get back to that normalcy.”