This week marks the one-year anniversary of Georgia declaring a public health state of emergency in the face of the emerging coronavirus, known to everyone now as COVID-19.
It’s incredible how many things are different from just a year ago. Truly, our entire culture that seemed immutable has been reshaped because of this pandemic.
When it first started, we did not understand or appreciate the scope of this crisis. We thought if there was an outbreak somewhere in the county, it must have come from one particular person at a specific location. We did not even use the term “community spread” before then.
Soon we discovered there was no way we were going to be able to trace down how deeply the virus had proliferated our communities. Between people who had been on airplanes or at large gatherings over the previous months as the virus spread here from overseas and then into our homes and places of business, we did not know from where the attack was coming.
This shifted our paradigm from being skeptical that the virus would change our daily lives to wondering if it was an airborne bubonic plague that was going to kill us all. The cloud of uncertainty was as thick as it had ever been in the history of American life.
At first, the school closure was only going to last two weeks. Then it became mid-April, then the rest of the semester. Then some schools in Georgia just got back into their buildings in the last couple of weeks. Habersham County was fortunate that we were able to get our kids back in school for the majority of this year, while others were not as lucky. Some in other parts of the country still are not back.
We went through a lot of blood, sweat and tears this year. We have seen 138 Habersham County residents die from this disease among the 4,553 who tested positive, about 1 in 10 residents of the county.
That figure even seems low, since COVID-19 has touched everyone’s life in some way, and not just restricting our ability to gather and have fun. We all have friends and family members who this has affected, and many of us have lost people close to us.
This has been a long year, and a longer one for some than others. But we have endured, and we are still here. It is our responsibility to take the experience of the last year and learn from it, finding out what we can integrate into our lives going forward that can make our communities a better place as we recover.
If better health practices in general foster a stronger, healthier world, then perhaps it will not all have been for nothing.
We reminded everyone in March that in good times and bad, we are a mirror of our community.
“But we are also a mirror of its strength and its desire to stick together and beat this thing together, so we can get back on our feet,” we said in our editorial March 20, 2020.
To confirm, we are, we have and we will.