When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, death’s scythe went sweeping through church choirs and funeral services and fish fries and poker nights, cutting off the living with a whisper of infectious breath. Some of us were too worried to go to church or attend funerals or fish fries or game nights; the terrifying contagion of COVID-19 was visible enough to us in the red dots popping up and expanding like drops of blood against the black background of the Johns Hopkins map we refreshed and then refreshed again. The numbers kept rising, and the unsuspecting or unconvinced or unprotected or undervalued — those “essential workers” who waded into this contagion like substitutes sent into battle in our stead — kept dying.
Last spring we had something like a collective, public reckoning, a moment when the risks of COVID seemed real enough to enough people that a sharply divided Congress actually passed some legislation, inadequate though it was, to provide a token of financial relief, a brief period of reprieve from the rent collector. That was the closest we came to a national consensus that the coronavirus was even real. And that was not close enough.
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