Impatience and habit during a pandemic

Impatience and habit during a pandemic

By 

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

March 31, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+9

A health-care worker administers the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at a vaccination clinic in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on March 4. (Jennifer Gauthier/Bloomberg)

The end of March means my monthly pandemic diary is now one year old. I was not sure how long it would last when it began in March 2020, but the idea of a whole year of pandemic life seemed inconceivable.

A quick recap of the gamut of reactions the novel coronavirus has generated over the past year:

As the first year of the pandemic comes to a close, this past month has been about my impatience with ending this phase of life.

Things are getting better! A larger fraction of the population is now vaccinated against covid-19. All of the reporting shows that by June the United States will have a surplus of vaccines rather than a surplus of people wanting to get vaccinated. It is wonderful to see the exit out of the pandemic year.

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People in my orbit are getting their shots. My parents are fully vaccinated, as is my wife. Over the past month it has been delightful to see so many friends and colleagues post selfies of getting jabbed.

I will confess to having one small, self-interested question: “When in the name of all that is holy do I get my shot?!”

The vagaries of vaccine distribution have made me appreciate the mixed blessing of living in Massachusetts during a pandemic. There is widespread acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing and the power of vaccines. Unfortunately, this also means that the state has been much slower in opening up vaccinations to the general population. In contrast to, say, Tennessee or Alabama, more folks here want to be vaccinated. The queue is longer. Those of us who are not over 65 or do not have comorbidities or are not an essential worker will have to wait until April 19 at the earliest.

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My rational brain says that is fine. It is an objectively good thing that I am young and healthy enough not to be considered a high medical risk. I do not need the vaccine the way more vulnerable demographics need it.

Psychologically, however, my need feels pretty desperate. I keep thinking about the scene in “Jaws” when Robert Shaw’s character Quint relays the story of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the shark feeding frenzy that followed. Once the rescue plane arrive, he said, “that was the time I was most frightened, waiting for my turn.”

That is how I feel now. I have spent a year circumscribing my daily life to avoid getting sick and getting others sick. To contract the disease now, when the way out is partially illuminated, would be a rebuke of everything sacrificed in the past 12 months. As a nascent fourth wave emerges in my state, activities I have done regularly over the past year, like grocery shopping, fill me with a dread I have not felt since last spring. It is not rational but that does not mean it’s not real.

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What makes this all worse is the claustrophobia of my daily life. In the year before the pandemic I had visited Moscow, Munich, Beijing, Dubai, Chicago, Toronto and Bryce Canyon. In the past 12 months, my universe has shrunk to my house, its environs, and the occasional local errand.

It is impossible not to obsess over the minutiae of daily life in a way that I was previously too busy to notice. Some gurus and psychologists think this is healthy, a way of staying ever-present in the moment. It’s true, I have become much more attentive to the changing of the seasons and the cycle of nature. But there’s a dark side to that kind of attentiveness: noticing that I am slightly better than my wife at preparing our morning coffee or loading our dishwasher, for example. Her realization that she is slightly better at almost everything else in our quotidian existence is also a thing.

Ordinarily, these small things would not be noticeable. When there is nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, they feel more important. So for the love of God, someone in this commonwealth give me a vaccine and give it to me soon. I am weary of my small world. I want so much for it to become big again.