My wife worked in ICU then COVID ICU. She still gets PTSD flashbacks from everything she dealt with when someone comes in with similar symptoms. I got front row tickets to seeing a person who's entire job is to keep people alive go from "oh someone I had today coded and we couldn't bring them back" every so often to "we had multiple people die today. A few more aren't much longer. If we put them on their back, they'll die. If we give them water, they'll choke and die. They still refuse to believe that COVID is real as they are actively suffering and dying of it".

Yeah, we get a touch testy when people say it was fake or overblown

I worked at a nursing home at that time. So many people died or were impacted, an entire wing got shut down because of how many patients were lost. It then re-opened to be exclusively for Covid patients.

My grandma died there. I was the last relative to see her alive. The day before she passed, I called all of my aunts/uncles, siblings, and some of my cousins (the ones closest to her) so they could say their goodbyes. As anyone who’s worked with dying patients knows, sometimes people cling on and suffer in a terminal state until they get closure from a relative giving them “permission” to let go. I had to be that person. I told her that it’s okay, that we all love her and we understand. Although she appeared catatonic, right after I said that, a tear rolled down her eye. I think she heard me and understood, though there’s no way to really know. It was a hard day. She passed the next morning.

Sometime last year, I heard someone say something to the effect of "I think the pandemic had a pretty major effect on all of us," and for a moment I thought "honestly I think I got through it fairly unscathed" because I was only considering my tolerance for the disruption to my life at the time. I was in a financially secure position and had plenty of social contact with friends through online gaming. I never felt any more depressed than normal throughout "quarantine" insofar as we even had one. Got my vaccines. Never tested positive. Didn't lose anyone close to me (to the illness). Overall, I thought I'd made it through pretty alright.

Then I thought for just a few seconds more and I realized that the pandemic is what caused me to literally give up on humanity. Seeing how little everyone cared about anyone who was actually affected. People making posts online about how it was "fake" when people all over the world were dying. The ones who refused to wear a mask. Such a simple fucking request. Put this cloth over your face for a while and you can help not get people killed, but they still wouldn't do it. I lived in a more rural area at the time, so it took a while for things to get really bad there. I remember thinking "you idiots will change your tune when it's your grandmother dying" and then they just didn't... Their own friends and family dying around them and most just slid further into conspiracy and paranoia.

The whole experience just fundamentally reshaped what I believe about humans and I don't think anything will ever be able to switch things back. It reminds me of the scene in Terminator where John Connor says "We're not gonna make it are we? People, I mean."

Just a quiet resignation to the reality that left with nothing more than our own devices and all the resources we'd need to persist until the heat death of the universe, we'll likely end up going extinct due to something completely preventable and probably caused by us. We choose our own destruction.

I didn't feel this way before covid. I used to believe we'd eventually figure things out. Not anymore.

It bothers me to this day that people thought it was a hoax. A lot of people I knew who thought it was a hoax wound up catching Covid, though none of them were hospitalized over it, which honestly kinda sucks because it means they didn't learn their lesson.

I was routinely being sent to places like Texas to work during the pandemic because they didn't care. It made me so mad being down there and getting made fun of for wearing a mask when where I live, you couldn't go into any building without one.