A eulogy for the euphoric days of America's pre-Delta summer.
 | By Eleanor Barkhorn Editor at Large, Opinion |
Back in July, I wrote Luke Winkie an email. |
It was still a hopeful moment then; the pandemic in America seemed to be receding. It was too early to see the terrible toll that the Delta variant would take on case loads and hospitalization numbers. It looked like the summer was going to be a joyous stream of long-delayed vacations, weddings and dinner parties with friends. |
And so I asked Winkie if he would be up for writing "something on the economic indicators that illustrate that people are starting to have fun again." Stuff like airlines struggling to find enough pilots to meet all the pent-up vacation demand. We'd call it the Joy Index, I told him. |
"Hahaha yeah that sounds like a lot of fun," he replied. We set an early August deadline. |
By the time Winkie sent me his essay, though, everything had changed. We were clearly in the middle of yet another terrible Covid surge. The euphoria of the early summer felt like a distant memory. The Joy Index had collapsed. |
Rather than abandon the idea altogether, though, we decided to take it in a different direction. Winkie wrote an essay about those happy days of late spring and early summer — and the terrifying, disorienting shift that occurred as we all realized that the pandemic was not, in fact, over. |
"I miss that ignorance," Winkie writes of the pre-Delta summer. I do, too. Rereading that first email I sent Winkie feels like looking back on a completely different world. |
We've learned our lesson. |
"I think we're all becoming accustomed to the truth that escaping from a pandemic was never going to be so simple," he writes. "The restoration is going to happen in fits and starts, with a permeating sense of unease." |
Still, the pre-Delta summer gave us a glimpse of what lies ahead when the pandemic does end. The Joy Index will rebound, and when it does we'll appreciate it all the more. |
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