Welcome to year 4 of COVID-19

What is the difference between last week and this week?

Answer: Last week everyone was at the end of the third year of the coronavirus pandemic. This week we all step into, no not its fourth year but the first year of what the World Health Organization in January termed a global health emergency.

When the United Nations' backed World Health Organization declares a global health emergency, pay attention. We can breathe a sigh of relief that we are out of the three-year grip of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemics are defined as everywhere, able to infect everybody, all at once. Thankfully, scientists and public health officials worldwide, from governments at every level, from academia and from industry worked tirelessly and in unison from early 2020 to save our lives.

Recall how the lives of everyone, in every country in the world changed literally overnight. Here, in the state of Washington, Governor Jay Inslee declared a statewide emergency February 29, 2020. As March ended, proclamations from the governor shut down the state: businesses and schools closed and everyone was told to stay home.

On the national level, then-President Donald Trump declared a national emergency March 13, 2020.

For the rest of the year the old normal was upended. Some people debated the possibility of a new normal and the invitation to rethink and remake all kinds of interactions and institutions. Some people made masks and gave them freely to family, friends and essential workers.

Remember essential workers? They were those that had to show up: Healthcare workers, grocery store employees, those in the food and transport industries and many other sectors.

Reflect on the earliest dark days of the coronavirus pandemic when it was an unknown threat whose scourge seemed limitless. We were all told to stay home. We locked ourselves up in our houses. Schools were shut, church services canceled, businesses closed. We gave each other a wide berth passing on the sidewalk, wore masks on the beach and in the woods, followed arrows on the floor in the grocery store and stood on circle decals marked six feet apart..

It was almost a year till effective vaccines against COVID-19 were developed and started to get distributed. But recall, life did not suddenly open up in 2021 and our routines did not resume. 2022 was the year of the most U.S. deaths, 475,000, as ever more contagious variants mutated and people lined up to get vaccinated.

For numbers, 350,000 people died in 2020, with the first death in January and both the spread of the virus and the nationwide lockdown affecting the spread. In 2022, with vaccines widely available and boosters and more knowledge and treatments, 267,000 people died. In mid-March 2023, the World Health Organization confirms 1.12 million U.S. deaths, by far the most of any country in the world.

In Washington state some 1.93 million cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed by the Department of Health and almost 15,700 people have died. Skagit county has counted almost 29,000 cases and at least 272 deaths.

All this comes with an asterisk since public health confirmed testing and reporting test results have declined. The wide availability of home-test kits is another advance against the pandemic, but the experts tell us that COVID-19 cases are both underreported and undetected. Likewise, the number of deaths is an estimate and deaths from complications are not all counted.

Here in Washington, Inslee's COVID 19 emergency declaration expired Oct. 31, 31 months after he first went on TV.

We, residents in this state or nationally, throughout the country, were never unified and never in common agreement about the pandemic, as we have not been about anything tinged with politics or government decision making for over a decade. Public health emergencies require social support, from national government funding and advocacy to local community adherence and follow through on an ongoing basis to both be effective and make progress in reducing the severity of the emergency society wide. That has been sadly absent.

It is amazing how unaffected any of us seem today by the trauma, panic and worldwide shutdown of life as we knew it in early 2020.