Covid-19 was five years ago… Man that takes me back.
It’s wild that the pandemic was half a decade ago already. It simultaneously feels like yesterday and like a generation ago. So when I was asked to write a column about my experience at the time, it’s weird to look back at where my life was then.
I was a freshman at South Dakota State and my mother, sister and I had planned a trip to Palm Desert, California during my spring break. It was a trip we had planned for months.
My mom and I are big tennis fans and one of the biggest pro tournaments in the world was at Indian Wells, a 5-minute drive from my grandparents' condo. It had been 10 years since we had last been out there, so we figured it was a good time to make our return.
But in the weeks before our trip, we started hearing about this disease that was beginning to spread worldwide, which made us increasingly concerned. After questions of whether to go on the trip, we decided since Covid hadn’t really hit America yet, we would continue with our plans.
The flight out there was fine and we had an arranged cab from the airport to my grandparents' condo. I distinctly remember riding in that cab on the way to our condo when I received a notification on my phone stating the Indian Wells tennis tournament had been canceled. The whole reason we were out there was gone like 10 minutes after we landed.
Anyway, we got to our condo and seemingly the whole world started shutting down around us. As a sports guy, I remember the NBA was the first major league to shut down. Shortly after, March Madness was canceled.
Within an instant of being in California, we had no tennis, virtually nothing to do and no clue what would happen next.
I then started to think about what would happen at school. ‘Would we shut down too? There’s no way I go back on Monday.’ Then on March 12, I got an email from the SDSU president stating that spring break would be extended a week. Honestly, I was kind of excited at first that I wouldn’t have to deal with school for another week.
ADVERTISEMENT
Four days later, a follow-up email came that said all classes would be moved online for the rest of the semester, which was fine with me since I hated living in the dorms.
As the world was shutting down around us, we started worrying about whether we’d even be able to fly out of Palm Desert. I remember my mom telling my grandpa that if we couldn’t fly out, we would take my grandparents' car and drive it back home.
Luckily we didn’t have to do that. After a week in the desert, we made our connecting flight through Dallas and then to Omaha and back home to Sioux City.
Once we got home though, we heard on the news that the DFW Airport was shutting down flights and that people going through security had to quarantine in Dallas. That apparently happened while we were waiting at our gate about to fly out. Since we were on a connecting flight we didn't have to go through security.
Back at home, in a seemingly completely different world than when I left, I had online classes for the rest of the term. Not gonna lie, I was definitely one of those students who turned my camera off during online lectures and went back to bed. My grades suffered a bit as a result, so I don’t recommend it.
Fast forward to the fall of 2020, my sophomore year. Classes were moved to a hybrid format, some online, some in person. I started working for my college newspaper, The Collegian, as a sports reporter. One of the sports I was lucky enough to cover was football, but there was one problem. The SDSU football season got moved from the fall to the spring.
Suddenly I was covering college football games in March and April, which felt all kinds of wrong, in front of a limited capacity audience all while wearing a mask.
ADVERTISEMENT
My first two years of college were so affected by Covid that I was envious of people who got to experience a normal college life their first two years. But looking back, I’m glad things happened the way they did for me, because it’s helped shape me.
What I think is the most interesting, and what I'm most grateful for, is that my family members were the only people I knew who didn’t get Covid. It remained that way until around late 2022-early 2023 when my sister got it.
Seemingly everyone else in the family got it after that, both my grandparents, my mother and then eventually me. I was the latest to get it, during the holidays last year. Luckily it was a mild case, but I still had to miss Christmas.
Overall, I’m super grateful I didn’t lose anybody close to me to Covid, like so many unfortunately did.
It was such a crazy time and it very well could be the craziest time of my life. It’ll be something we’ll tell future generations about — what it was like to live through Covid. At the time, I thought life would never be the same, and in a way it isn’t. But here we are five years later, thankfully back to a seemingly normal life.
The Trust Project
