Today marks five years since COVID-19 shuttered Iowa

Exactly five years later, the memories from that first year of the COVID-19 pandemic remain as surreal as the year itself.

March 16, 2020 was the day Iowa began shutting down in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. I sat on my couch that Monday morning watching President Donald Trump and Gov. Kim Reynolds give consecutive press conferences with urgent updates on the pandemic. Nationwide, citizens were being asked to stay home. Touting “expert data“ that could “lower the infection rate over the entire course of the coronavirus,“ then-Vice President Mike Pence pushed the plan of “15 Days to Slow the Spread,”

(Fifteen days. Ha ha ha ha ha.)

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In Iowa, Reynolds recommended that schools close immediately. Some businesses had already sent workers home to work remotely. The following day, Reynolds ordered all bars, gyms, theaters and casinos closed. Restaurants had to halt dine-in services. It was St. Patrick’s Day, but no one was feeling the luck o’ the Irish.

I spent the rest of that March the same way most others did: At home, streaming TV shows and movies. I had my groceries delivered. I collected my mail with kitchen tongs and let it sit in the sun to kill whatever germs might linger on the surface. Even at the time, I knew it was weird.

But things weren’t so bad. I had a nice condo, food in the fridge and plenty to watch on TV. I was happy, safe and well.

I was also bored out of my mind. So in April, when my boss at the county Elections department put out the invitation to help with drive-through early voting for the upcoming June primary election, I was overjoyed.

Election workers were required to wear face masks. Though I had not yet realized it at the time, it was my saving grace that I was able to tolerate a mask without debilitating headaches. Two years later, I was no longer as fortunate.

Of course, finding disposable face masks was easier said than done in the spring of 2020. My mother ended up sewing a homemade mask for me out of old Iowa State Cyclone-print fabric scraps leftover from when she made pajama pants for her nephew.

I spent May working drive-up early voting. Voters would receive their ballots on a plastic clipboard to mark in their cars, deposit their sealed ballots in a secured ballot drop, and discard their plastic clipboards in a tub with antiseptic solution where they had to soak for 10 minutes before they were deemed safe to use again. The process kept us on our feet to say the least.

We were lent heavy industrial face shields to wear over our masks. When it rained, my getup included a big yellow poncho with “ELECTIONS DEPT” emblazoned on its front. I looked like Rubber Duckie had grown up and joined the riot squad.

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But we pulled it off — a successful primary election in early June. To thank the drive-up voting and tech equipment workers, an Elections department manager raised the garage doors of our building and treated us to an open-air lunch, making filet mignon on site using sous vide equipment. If you ever want to see me in a really good mood, feed me a medium-rare steak that I can chew without using any teeth.

After that crazy primary, I should have been glad to return to my couch. But I was in no hurry to revisit the angst everyone else was feeling over our absence from daily life and uncertainty over when — or if — normalcy would return.

The May 25 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis had proved a lit match tossed in the vat of kerosene that was the American mood. It didn’t require much discernment to see that the rage expressed at protests across the country was about so much more than perceived racism or police violence.

Only weeks after public health experts had condemned anti-lockdown protests, many of those same experts endorsed anti-racism protests, claiming they were a matter of health — apparently one urgent enough to justify an abrupt about-face from previous admonitions to stay at home to avoid the spread of COVID.

“In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus,” wrote public health professor Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, then of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Medicine, on Twitter on June 2.

I remember June 2020 as the month I realized public health and the mainstream practice of medicine had become infected by ideology. Experts we were supposed to trust had started choosing what was socially acceptable over what was practical and sensible. The result: a widespread loss of faith in American medicine.

Like millions nationwide, I have yet to fully recover my confidence in our health care system, where craft and culture still occasionally clash.

In late July, I had my 20th surgery at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, a simple hernia repair. It was the only elective procedure I’ve ever had for which the surgeon and an operating room were available within a mere five days. After suspending elective surgeries for over a month beginning in March, the hospital had without a doubt been understandably desperate to book revenue-generating business again.

I had spent a collective 63 nights as an inpatient at UI Hospitals over the previous 20 years. With COVID-19 protocol in place, I might as well have been in a foreign land.

I recovered by early August, just before the 2020 derecho. With our homes and businesses in shambles, face masks and social distancing suddenly didn’t seem that important. Not while we navigated streets with felled trees to check on family and friends and ate our meals with neighbors who pitched in to help clear debris from the whole block.

The pandemic was still raging, of course. But the derecho was our reminder that phone calls and Zoom meetings aren’t enough to keep a people together. Our communities cannot thrive if we are physically isolated from one another.

In September, I went to work for the 2020 Census, where I was amazed at how many people clearly eager for human contact seemed happy — excited, even — to speak with the stranger flashing a government ID at their doorstep. I was also called back to Elections, where I spent hours working with a group of temporary workers putting bar coded labels on envelopes for the eventual mailing of tens of thousands of absentee ballots — the largest mail ballot operation in county history.

Thank God the work was there for us to do. We temporary election workers were the privileged ones — out of the house, interacting with people, and doing something important. I vowed to never turn up my nose at tedious clerical work again.

Normalcy was no longer a comfort. It was a craving. In early October, Jack Trice Stadium opened for fans to watch the Iowa State Cyclones battle the Oklahoma Sooners. Attendance was capped 25% of normal capacity with a strict mask mandate and social distancing. Instead of the roar of 61,500 fans, my family and I participated in the smattering of cheers from 15,000.

Still, I was so happy to be there that I had to fight back tears.

Two days later on Oct. 5, early voting for the 2020 general election began — my first election leading a team of in-person early voting workers. We were set up in a warehouse across the street from the County Auditor’s office big enough to accommodate six-foot social distancing. I would spend every drive home across town after my 10-hour day praying that my scratchy voice and sore throat weren’t the first symptoms of COVID, which I had not yet caught. Likely irritated from 10 hours of breathing through a stuffy mask, my throat would be calm by the time I arrived home.

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They were good days, but they were long, and tiring. I would stick Post-its to my leather couch with notes I wrote myself to warn against sitting there to eat my supper, lest I fall asleep and wake up the next morning unable to move.

We survived Election Day in November, knowing that the county valued and appreciated our work. Instead of another celebratory lunch, we got an email encouraging us to isolate for 10 days due to an election worker testing positive for COVID.

I evaded infection but languished through the rest of the month, exhausted from the election cycle and the sour national mood from the skyrocketing case count.

Thanksgiving that year was my family’s little act of “civil disobedience” (as my father called it) in the face of a limit of in-person gatherings.

We didn’t regret it for a moment. Nor did we regret our fairly normal family Christmas that December. Being together was the only gift any of us really wanted. That and a Cyclone Fiesta Bowl victory.

January was glum. I knew better than to turn on the news. I was sick of being stuck at home. We were all sick of it. We were all stuck.

So I was happy in February to help staff a satellite auditor’s office at the mall. When we weren’t issuing ballots for revenue questions in a couple school districts, my colleague and I passed the time exchanging pleasantries with masked mall-walkers and snacking on soft pretzels. It was bliss.

On March 17, 2021, I took a newly-vaccinated friend out to a restaurant so she could enjoy a green beer to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. It was her first time out of the house since the onset of the pandemic.

It had been one year since the COVID-19 pandemic had turned our world upside down. And what a year it was.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com