Covid 19: Years From Now, How Will We Explain?

(Warning: as you can probably tell, this post is about Coronavirus/Covid 19.

It also references: anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theories, general 2020-ness, mental health problems, Trump, discrimination, ableism, systemic racism, and other systemic discrimination)

“My grandparents lived through the First World War and the Spanish Flu and all that,” my mam said, “it’s weird — they never talked about it much.”

“Well,” I said, “imagine explaining 2020, and the pandemic, to someone who’s not even born yet. How could you even begin to make them understand?”

Image: author’s own, made in Canva

If a child asked, decades from now, ‘what happened in 2020 and 2021? How did so many people die of Covid?’ — what would you answer?

Where would we start? With the fires and the floods and World War Three trending at the beginning of 2020?

Or would we just jump straight into the Lockdowns, the social distancing, masks, Covid testing, the race for a vaccine…?

How could we explain that while people died, the politicians argued over nonsense?