‘Post-COVID Life’ | The Drawing Board

During the week of Feb. 6, 3,475 people died from COVID-19 in the United States. Fewer Americans were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1.1 million people in this country have been lost to the disease. Too many of us are numb to the magnitude of those numbers.

People get sick and die, we grieve, and we move on. Yet these deaths were avoidable.

In our “post-COVID” life, people casually discuss the material ways that the pandemic has altered our lives: the proliferation of QR codes, what shows they’re streaming, and hey, here’s a picture of my cute quarantine dog. The biggest change for me is that I now live with a worry that maybe nobody really cares about the loss of our neighbors.

Many of our fellow Americans actively fought against the circumstances that killed those people. But many more of us rushed back to business as usual for comfort and seemed to forget all about a million lives and counting. With worsening climate change, we’re certain to have more pandemics, more frequent economic threats, and more disasters. I worry that many of us will face those catastrophes by scratching out our own comfortable niches and leaving everyone else to die.

I don’t seem to have had COVID, and I still generally mask indoors. Whether or not each individual wears a mask probably doesn’t make a huge difference in most circumstances. Systemic change would be needed to substantially impact morbidity. But I go on wearing it.

I don’t think I do it just to wallow in the sadness of our collective loss. I think I probably wear a mask on the off chance that it’s part of helping to create a more caring society.

Max Temescu is an illustrator and designer based in Baltimore. temescuart.com

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