Pandemic year one: How our lives changed

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Once upon a time, a 35-year-old man from Snohomish — a town of a little more than 10,000 people in western Washington, barely 300 miles away — felt run down and fatigued.

He checked himself into a nearby hospital in Everett as a precaution, one that might have seemed unnecessary to most, but not to him. The man had seen these symptoms under a very different light than most Americans, having just returned from a trip to Wuhan, China, where he watched hundreds stricken with a pneumonia-like ailment.

As it turned out, the man had contracted the same strange virus. He was diagnosed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when most government administration offices are closed. As a result, the Centers for Disease Control wouldn’t officially mark him as the first American to test positive for the novel coronavirus until the next morning, January 21, 2020, one year ago today.

Since then, more than 400,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. The CDC reports the virus is now the country’s third leading cause of death for ages 45 to 84, bested only by heart disease and cancer.

No one in America has walked the past 365 days unscathed by COVID-19 in some way, shape or form. No one. Many have contracted COVID and survived. Some were less fortunate. All of us know someone or know someone who knows someone. All of us have been financially impacted from the shutdown. And all of us have had to make changes, from the minor inconvenience forcing a break in habit — “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, ‘STARBUCKS CLOSED THEIR LOBBY’”? — to finding entirely uncharted ways to live a new normal, including, but not limited to, James Stovern of Hayden.

“I hate that term,” Stovern said. “‘New normal.’ I want to strangle everyone who uses the term, ‘The new normal.’ But unfortunately, ours is a world of precedents, and we just set a new precedent.”

Stovern, like all of us, walked into Jan. 21, 2020, with a completely different set of routines, enough predictable patterns that ‘precedent’ was a word he never thought he’d have to dust off.

“Before COVID, my life was normal,” he said. “I was working in an office, attending events, church events, that sort of stuff. Nothing too fancy, you know? We were doing soccer with my son. We were doing all the sports events and everything. It was normal back then.”

‘Back then’ is another term that haunts the husband and father of two. Not unlike the one-day delay from when America’s Patient Zero in Snohomish was diagnosed and when his case was actually registered with the CDC, time in the age of COVID — an age filled with stay-home orders and quarantines — changed the way Stovern processed time, to the point where the days before COVID feel like a half-century ago.

“I don’t even remember what it feels like to be in a group of people that I don’t know,” Stovern said with a smile, “and not think about how dirty everyone else is.”

But as the reality of COVID set it, the virus would quickly hit Stovern’s day-to-day routines at his job, where he works as a customer service representative for a company that makes fire alarm control panels. The threat felt real, Stovern insisted, even if it remained separated by more than a few degrees.

“Remember April, when everyone was terrified they were going to get it?” he asked. “But really, honestly, no one really knew anybody that actually had it. It was just this horrific idea … A friend of a friend of a friend had it, and everybody was afraid of it, so you just worked from home. That was our first time with it, when there was literally zero danger.”

What was then called the first wave gave way to a second, then a third. By fall, no one at his job was immune.

“We thought we were going to escape this whole thing,” Stovern said. “We thought we were going to escape this, because we’re a small business of about 150 people. We thought we were going to sail through scott-free. Boy howdy, were we wrong? When it hit, it hit.”

Even after COVID-19 struck Stovern’s workplace, he still remained hopeful. The first thing he noticed, he said, is how his company needed to change.

“This is a business that could only work from work for the past 35 years doing exactly what we did,” he noted. “And we had to figure out how to work from home in a week. My company was still running off of tri-fold, tri-color paper. We would physically take orders and walk that order from one part of a company to another. A person would physically walk that order over to our shipping department or over to our accounting department. We were that dependent on paper, still.”

The company changed, soon configuring its ways to accommodate employees caught in a pandemic. Employees soon alternated working from home, Stovern said, but it wasn’t enough.

“I work really, really closely with about eight other people,” he said. “Four of them caught it, and I thought I was impervious.”

He wasn’t. He remembers Halloween 2020 as the last day he felt normal. Soon after, he tested positive, as did his wife, Jen. He said he’s confident his 6-year-old son, Lucas, and his 2-year-old, Chloe, contracted COVID-19, as well, choosing not to have them tested, as they would spend their two-and-a-half weeks in isolation together.

But Stovern’s time in isolation was no family picnic. While Jen remained completely asymptomatic, the patriarch of the family lost his senses of taste and smell, which triggered an unusual-for-him anxiety that kept him from sleeping. The insomnia brought on hallucinations, he said, but the one place he wanted to go for help — Kootenai Health — wasn’t an option.

“This was early November,” he said. “At that time, they were shipping people who were checking into Kootenai [Health] and could make the trip over to Seattle.”

As area hospitals — Kootenai Health included — hit maximum capacity, Stovern decided to wait it out. As he recovered, his senses of taste and smell eventually returned, something the home brew enthusiast said he felt in joyous relief.

“I couldn’t imagine never being able to smell a hop again,” he said. “Honest to goodness, that was my biggest fear in that moment.”

So what lesson has the last year taught Stovern? As he bottled beers in his basement, he reflected on his employer, his family and his bout with the disease before answering.

“You have to learn how to take the modern challenges that exist,” he said, “and you have to adapt.”

Kevin Knepper, CEO at Kaniksu Health Services, said the last couple of months have left him and others working in health care feeling burnt out. Fatigue from challenges brought on in their personal lives as well as their jobs, have created stress.

“[It is] The same thing that the rest of the public deals with,” he said.

Not being able to spend time with family and friends, going to a movie or go out to dinner without thinking about it is tough. Before the pandemic reached the U.S., going out was a simple matter of getting in the car and getting on the road. Now there are limits, restrictions and closures to think about. Masks are required in the five northern counties under a Panhandle Health District order and life doesn’t look like what it did a short year ago.

For Marian Martin, R.N. and Emergency Department manager at Bonner General Health, in addition to the challenges she faces at work in caring for COVID-positive patients are the personal challenges of being unable to see her family in Canada.

“I have lived in the US for 30 years, all my family is in Canada and it is very difficult to not know when I will see them again due to the border closure and required quarantine for travel,” she said.

Several respondents interviewed said that over the past year, fear of the unknown as a major factor in their personal and professional lives.

For educators, constant changes to school reopening plans after abrupt closures in the spring of 2020 forced many individuals to build skills in online schooling said Jeralyn Mire, a post-secondary transition counselor at Sandpoint High School. Mostly, though, there’s fatigue. Everyone, teachers and students alike, are ready to move on.

“Now, we’re tired,” she said. “I’m working with the students, and many seniors feel like they’re at a standstill.”

For students who are attending school in-person, Mire said, many have been forthcoming about struggles including depression and anxiety. In some cases, such as students who work from home, those challenges can be harder for teachers and counselors to identify.

“What’s hard for us, some of the students that are working virtually, their teachers don’t have eyes on them,” she said.

At the elementary level, children who are cohorted are also limited in the number of friends they’re able to see.

“Kids might have a best friend in someone else's class, they don't necessarily see as much as they did last year,” said Erik Olson, principal at Farmin-Stidwell Elementary School. “That's hard for some kids.”

One change educators have seen from that limited contact with other students, said Casey Mclaughlin, Sandpoint Middle School principal, has been a dramatic decrease in behavioral issues and fighting with other students.

However, the reason children aren’t getting into too much trouble also means they aren’t able to get the same social-emotional learning experiences that they normally would, he said.

“The problem with that is the behavior issues are part of what kids learn through,” Mclaughlin said. “ And I've always said that it's not necessarily a bad thing. We've got to teach through those behavior issues and teach kids how to respond and how do you react.”

At the high school level, both students and teachers seem to be experiencing more anxiety, said Sandpoint High School principal David Miles. Many students also responded to a survey Miles sent out saying they feel their social lives at school are worse.

“They’re right, there’s definitely less social interaction,” he said. “On the other side, and from a non-student perspective … First and foremost our business is to educate students. The students don’t like to see it that way.”

Much like their students, many teachers are also feeling the effects of social isolation from the virus, he said.

“I hear from teachers all the time, they feel really isolated,” he said. “And so they even at school, you know, they're not meeting with their colleagues all the time, or they're not just able to have kind of those fun interactions with everyone where they all get together and sit down and eat together and hang out together.”

At Farmin-Stidwell Elementary, administrators are working to try and create more social-emotional support for teachers who have been asked to do more than ever, Olson said.

“We're very flexible with them as administrators, we work with our teachers, if they need breaks, we offer them breaks we have, we roll around a snack cart,” he said. “We give them chocolate, and there's endless supplies of coffee, and, you know, anything that we can do to help.”

Looking into the new year, many respondents said they hope that they, and the people they care about, will be able to connect more with others.

“My hope, honestly, is that, we're going to be able to restore some of the lost social connections that kids have with each other with their teachers,” Mclaughlin said.

For Boundary County Commissioner Dan Dinning, there is nothing more important than his faith, his family and his community. The pandemic has impacted each of those areas, with no area of his life immune.

To minimize their risk, Dinning and his wife limited their contact to close family members, trips and activities were canceled, and meetings held over Zoom or similar online platforms.

He admits, he doesn’t mind the lack of time required to attend an afternoon’s meeting in Boise. In the past, it was a day there, and a day back punctuated by the meeting in the middle. However, the personal cost of the pandemic has been tough in just about every way.

“It was extremely hard in the beginning, I think, to adjust to everything that was being asked of us,” Dinning said.

Visits with a son and his family who live in Arizona are now done via FaceTime, with the last in-person visit in February before things were locked down in March. Another son and his daughter live in Boundary County but visits are kept to a limit and his family are cautious to keep their chances of getting or spreading the virus to a minimum.

“I think pre-COVID we took a lot of things for granted, with family and with friends and with social interactions,” Dinning said.

He is grateful his church is able to meet – taking all appropriate precautions — with faith a key part of his life along with his family and friends. He is optimistic about the future, to getting back to normal, whatever that might be.

“You take that for granted, or I had, and I’m looking forward to the future, getting back to normal although I don't know what normal looks like, now, when I use that word. As we go forward, hopefully, it's back to as we were pre-COVID.”

While saddened by divisions in the country, Dinning said he’s looking forward to a time when restrictions aren’t the order of the day, of being able to spend time with those he loves, and doing things he enjoys without worry.

“I'm kind of an optimist,” Dinning said. “We're going to get through this. There will be the other side of it and I'm going to say that I don't know what normal looks like, but we're going to get back to something more close to what we're used to, whatever that is.”

COVID-19 dramatically has changed how Idaho residents view food security. One particular aspect that has changed is the shipment of products to grocery stores. Many remember shelves completely empty and fearing a lack of supplies to sustain themselves.

The quarantines and lockdowns helped to alter some activities and many Idahoans began to pursue DIY projects such as baking their own loaves of bread or gardening.

According to Josh and Carolyn Thomas, owner/operator of Homesteading Family, an organization that informs, teaches and builds skills for people looking to create self-sufficiency through homesteading, COVID-19 has brought much interest and disruption into the homesteading and DIY industry.

“I think we’re seeing an increase in kind of all homesteading activities from gardening to preserving, even just from scratch cooking,” Carolyn Thomas said, “definitely things like raising chicken and livestock and moving out to the country in general.”

The insecurity many felt with shortages prompted many to find some security through producing their own food. This insecurity is also felt in city and suburban areas and has led to small scale food production.

“Were seeing people want to know about small scale gardening and what they can do on a small property,” Josh Thomas said.

According to Josh and Carolyn Thomas, homesteading and small scale, food production has been a growing trend especially for people wanting healthier food choices but the fear of COVID-19 are homesteading out of a feeling of necessity.

According to Carolyn Thomas, the events of COVID-19 in the last year have collectively created a memory of the events and changes in behaviors for people now seeing benefits to gardening and baking for themselves.

Josh and Carolyn Thomas stated the similarities and lessons learned between the lasting impacts of the Great Depression and COVID-19.

“You hear people who lived through the Great Depression and it changed the whole next generation as they took the lessons they learned from that and continued to apply them,” Carolyn Thomas said.

According to Josh Thomas, there was a meat shortage and many are still concerned about the closures of meat processing plants; this increased demand to have local bought and raised meat from community butcher shops.

The increase in gardening, baking and producing food has also added extra stress by increasing shortages for homesteading essential products.

“We definitely have huge numbers of purchases on seeds already, where the demand is very high for the beginning of the year,” Carolyn Thomas said, “but we’re seeing shortages in preserving supplies across the board, they haven’t really recovered from 2020.”

Items like dehydrators, dough mixers, chicks and seeds are all in short supply, causing disruptions for homesteaders and those looking to begin their gardening journey.

Josh Thomas waited for an upright freezer, which took about five months to receive because all local suppliers were already out.

Many people in North Idaho have few sources from local suppliers and will buy the last of the supplies.

“You just happen to get what you find, it’s hit or miss,” Josh Thomas said.

COVID-19 caused many disruptions to supplies and livelihoods, but it has also created opportunities for self-sufficiency.

“I’m really excited, and I’m really encouraged that as a community that so many people in Boundary County are taking food production seriously because that increases everyone’s food security,” Carolyn Thomas said, “It’s woken a lot of people up to the seriousness to having a better food system for our community.”

Both Josh and Carolyn Thomas believe that people should not panic and react but take steps to bring resiliency to their community by gardening, cultivating and growing food.

“As more people produce a little more food on whatever scale they can and share, swap and engage each other,” Josh Thomas said, “We just see that as a positive across the board.”

Keith Kinnaird and Victor Corral Martinez contributed to this story.