COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Everyday life’ has a new connotation

Calibration in the time of COVID is a dangerous pursuit, imperiled by memory as it pinballs through the chasm between cultural minutiae and the sprawling shadow of death.

“So what did you do during the pandemic?” comes the inescapable question of the next generation.

To begin with, I went out and got a huge package of toilet paper, carrying it away over my shoulder like a child I’d rescued from a burning building, in spite of the fact that toilet paper was no more or less necessary than ever except as a vehicle for demonstrating how to create a shortage where no shortage existed.

Then I washed my hands really, really well.

Eventually, having assessed the risk of coronavirus in its freshest iteration and listened attentively to the medical experts and the various government health officials scrambling to implement life-saving protocols in a socio-political crucible, I got a haircut.

Such were our emotional luxuries, the remembrance of COVID as that time your 40-minute commute shrank to four seconds, of that time you ventured to a hockey game and a school board meeting broke out, of glaring at a mirror, flexing your eyebrows because you were worried your Zoom face was just too inexpressive, of trying to ascertain the precise cultural flashpoint when you’d know — you’d know beyond any doubt — that COVID was over.

I thought it would be when COSTCO started serving samples again, but I was wrong. It shall be when contestants on “Wheel of Fortune” can again spin the wheel without using that stupid spinning cap thing. Introduced in 2020 so no one had to grip the wheel with an inadequately washed hand for fear of spreading or contracting the virus to or from another inadequately washed hand, the little white spinning cap endures to this day.

It’s at the opposite end of our COVID consciousness where everything spun out of control.

It was two years ago Friday — March 11, 2020 — that the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. It was two years ago Saturday that President Donald Trump said, “We’ve stopped it.” It’ll be two years on March 26 that the United States hit No. 1 in confirmed cases, and two years on April 6 that Trump said that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” That was the day the U.S. passed 10,000 deaths. There were at least 950,000 to come.

If you’re one of those people who somehow thought, amid the fearsome confusion of March 2020, “You know, a million people could die from this in America,” you’ll soon be right. That’s one in every 330 of us, roughly. That’s 320 9/11’s. It’s about 182 souls lopped off any Steelers crowd (about 60,000) and gone forever.

The global death toll is six million, but no wealthy country has lost a larger percentage of people, a larger piece of itself, than America. This nation’s darkest hour was not its finest, as many of these deaths or even most were preventable through a vaccine available just nine months into it. Not enough of us bought it, never mind that it was free. Even today, about a quarter of American adults are unvaccinated.

Between the minimal adjustments of the mildly inconvenienced and the churning grief of the heartsick were stories of towering courage and staggering bad luck. For every double shifting ICU nurse there’s a business person’s promising venture that may or may not exist anymore, at least in its intended form.

“It’s very ironic that when we launched Bold Escape Rooms, the idea was that it’s designed for tourists, for office workers looking to do some further bonding after work, and for foot traffic in the Strip District,” said Scott Simmons, who opened the business 31 days before the first lockdown. “Well, all three of those largely went away.

“So two summers ago, that was really a challenge. It was like, ‘Hey, you guys have been locked in a room for a couple of months, so — want to spend some money and, uh, also be locked in a room?”

Simmons owns the escape rooms that provide an immersive adventure for small groups on social outings, as well as Steel City Axes, an ax-throwing parlor at the same Strip District location, and also ScareHouse in the Galleria at Pittsburgh Mills. ScareHouse is more a seasonal phenomenon, a Halloween-themed destination where you pay for real actors in costume and makeup to scare the crap out of you as if the world weren’t doing a thorough enough job.

It’s been a rocky couple of years, but Simmons can see in the patterning a far better trend.

“It’s been very irregular because customer confidence has been so variable due to COVID,” he said. “But confidence is coming back. People are contacting us weeks or months in advance. When omicron was at its peak, it was hours in advance, but now, especially this week, that confidence is really coming back.”

During the worst waves of COVID, too many people discovered there was no business so perilous as when the business was you.

“When you work for yourself and the whole business is booking dates, you control your own destiny,” said local comic and actor Aaron Kleiber. “When all of a sudden there was no live comedy, that’s pretty scary. You can try to sustain it, but all of a sudden Venmo and Zoom comedy wasn’t paying the bills.”

Kleiber got construction work with a friend who was flipping houses and was fortunate that he qualified for unemployment after his bartending role in the Showtime series “American Rust” was cut from the script, but his comedy, his essence, suffered.

“I came out with my comedy special in April 2020 but it was filmed in 2019, and, after coming back, I didn’t want to do any of that material, so I felt like an open-miker,” he said. “I finally got a club date in Wisconsin with Harland Williams, a club I’d headlined three or four years earlier. I was excited, the crowd was excited, so glad to be out, and Thursday night, I was garbage.”

That’s doubtless hypercritical on the part of Kleiber, long one of Pittsburgh’s most original and energized acts, but he admits you probably shouldn’t call him one of area’s best young comics anymore.

“I came out of this an old-ass man,” he laughed. “I turned 40 in 2020. Now I’m all like, ‘these freaking dumb idiots. These stupid kids.’ I’m not doin’ a bit. I was serious.

“I’ve never judged somebody on their intelligence more than now.”

Though COVID was the worst national crisis since World War II, it failed to galvanize America’s sense of unity and purpose the way 9/11 did. COVID was content to merely expose all kinds of vulnerabilities, particularly in our politics and in our mental health. When the time finally came to be focused and serious like The Greatest Generation, we instead started screaming about Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, anti-Asian attacks, communism, socialism, fascism, and still more isms we could scarcely define. We started driving even more recklessly, and, of course, we went hard toward our old standby, killing each other.

Tribune News Service