One Year

change moving forward. Here's Emma. A year ago, my day would start with a train ride alongside thousands of fellow commuters into Manhattan. Once I got to work, I might get pulled into a meeting or two, or have lunch with a source. I would grab coffee with a colleague, and after work get dinner with friends. In other words, it was all pretty normal. Because I write about healthcare. The novel Coronavirus had been on my radar and in

my reporting for weeks. At that point, still, the infectious disease seemed far away, at a remove from daily life. That changed suddenly one Thursday morning. The train cars were emptier than ever before hours later, city and state politicians declared a state of emergency and put restrictions on gatherings. New York City bround to a halt. Now my commute is from one room of my apartment to another. Zoom calls have replaced meeting rooms, and after work plans involved

watching my house plants to grow. The piece of work and life has slowed, even stalled. Everyone has experienced something like this over the last year, a dramatic shift in the way we work, live, and spend time with our families. We've been collecting stories for the past few months about this change, and we want to share them with you as the pandemic enters. It's one year anniversary. I'm Suzanne Evans Wagner. My name is Betsy Sneller. Wagner and Sneller

are both professors of linguistics at Michigan State University. So the Machiane Diaries project came about as a way to test what the effects of the pandemic will be on language for speakers in Michigan. So getting these to audio diaries where people just tell us about their day or their week is really rich data. You know, the mundane ways that life has been changing is really valuable for us when we're going to go analyze how their language

has been changing. At the beginning of the pandemic, nobody knew what to call it. We didn't even know what to call it. Participants themselves were calling it anything from the current situation to Miss Rhona, to Rhona to coronavirus, to COVID nineteen to the pandemic um. And one thing that we found in our diary entries is that as time went on, the whole community kind of settled in on, Okay, we're just going to call it the pandemic. That's the term that we're gonna land on. So one thing to

know is that lexical items words to describe things. Lexical items change a lot, especially when there's a new thing that occurs, and we saw this at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly that there was kind of this explosion of new terms, maskal um, quarantine, e, all of these different terms related to like, oh, we're doing like zoom happy hour, things like that Baker's hotline. This is Amanda, how can I help you? My name is Amanda Schlaram and I'm a I'm a shift lead on the Baker's

hotline as well as the customer support side too. What I basically do is, um, I answer a lot of questions, some of the some of the bigger questions that come in about orders when I'm doing Baker's hotline things. I definitely take calls for baking fiascos and and such and how I try to help trouble shoot that. Usually this time of year spring, like going into spring late winter,

we kind of slow down. We still get a fair amount of calls, but it's not as crazy as like holiday where everyone's baking for the holidays, and like we came in and it was our phones were just just wild. Like it was, you know, twenty calls holding and everyone is asking what kind of flower they can use? You know, they're making sour dough. How do they do that? Um? What can they feed their sour dough because they don't

have the kind of flower we're suggesting it. Definitely, it was almost an overnight change, Like it was so fast. Anxieties were definitely running pretty high. People would say, you know, I can't find bread, so I'm now going to have to make all of my bread, and so then they'd want you to walk them through how to do that, like how exactly to make a loaf of bread and

so um. I do think there is definitely a lot of panic going on and then just overreaction too small baking problems that we would definitely talk them down and be like, like, you got this, you can do this. It's not going to be it's not going to be the end of the world. We feel like a lot of our calls are a lot longer now because people are either lonely or they're tired of talking to the people in their house or whatever, because they they just

started talking to us about everything. So it's it's definitely kind of learning how people deal with fuel of things has been interesting for me definitely. My name is Mike Builder. I'm the CEO of jack Box Games UM. Jack Box Games is a independent developer and publisher. We make party games that you play on your television, but then you use your mobile phone to uh to join them and play.

And they saw a really huge spike in gameplay and interest and trafficked our website um purchase of the game games. People usually play Jackbox games when they were together in the same room with a game up on a TV screen,

but that also changed during the pandemic. So people realized pretty quickly under the pandemic that that you could launched the game on your computer, have a zoom call, and just share the screen of the game and still have a really fun party environment, a social interaction with a ton of people over VidCon, as if you were sitting

in the same room together playing a party. When we were seeing this kind of interest in tracking happening in March and April last year, I mean that was a huge eye opener to us, like something unique is happening here. And you know, prior to quarantine, and and you know, people staying at home, UM, people would play our games over VidCon. I think entertainment as a whole has has you know, aside from maybe the box office, home entertainment U has definitely seen quite a boost out of this

home quarantine. UM. People are looking for escaped as them. They want to watch TV, they want to play video games, they want to be entertained, they want to be taken out of their their quarantine moment um. And so my industry, beat,

the video game industry has benefited from that. Here's Betsy Sneller from the Michigan Diaries project again at the beginning of the pandemic, it was kind of new and uh, you know, people would say, oh, I saw this new sign the neighborhood park is closed, or this new thing happened, and there was a lot to talk about. Kind of starting in August September, um, people were feeling sad. So we have a lot of diary entries. I actually have

people saying this is really boring. You guys are going to be really bored, and then in the background there's these big other things happening in the world. August, people were also thinking about back to school season and wondering whether kids would be able to go back. In person, I feel like people are going to be sick of go they not know that they're sick. Okay, and the mask sometimes I can't really heal with the mass, but I can't I can't really hear from mask that well.

So what kind of things that do you think that you could do to be safe if we have to go back to school on the ball? Social distance? Social distance? Do you think that might be hard at school? Yeah? Yeah. I've also been trying to think of like stuff that make my zoom meeting battle and stuff, because when you're

at school, it's kind of boring. So I so some of the things that I'm going to do is that I'm gonna use slime and I got some signs for my birthday, so I'm definitely going to be playing with that obviously, not like make a huge mess, but like away from the computer. But I'm going to just kind of be playing with a party or something just because that's a fun thing or like I I've just been that way. I don't get really, boy, do you mean because it's kind of boring. My name is Dr Jesse Gold.

I'm a psychiatrist and I see healthcare professionals and college students, and I work in St. Louis, Missouri at Washington University in St. Louis, where I'm an assistant professor and director of Wellness Engagement and Outreach. I think people are definitely sicker than maybe they were before UM. At the beginning

of the pandemic. I think we had a lull where people were sort of adjusting to the new normal, kind of in this fight or flight mode where they were just kind of I think you would just say, like making sure they had food, making sure they had water, making sure everything was safe and they didn't even really

think about their mental health. And even at the beginning we were sort of like, I guess we don't have that many patients were okay, And then it took off pretty quickly, and especially in healthcare workers, where what they're doing day to day has been so different and not at all what they're used to. You know, health care workers in general, when they sign on to do what they do, I didn't really think that they could get sick themselves or bring home the illness to family members,

and so that's a big change. They maybe would see one person die a shift, if any, and have seen just people dying and dying and dying. So I had a patient that is really struggling tell me that it has. She had called twenty places to try to get a therapist and nobody had openings. And I could like feel my body physically sink when she said that, and I

was really just taken aback by that. And I know very much that it's also not the therapist's fault, and that I've been talking to therapists a lot and they're really struggling. They they also have been taking extra sessions, working on weekends, taking their old clients back doing all of this extra stuff that you know, it's like flipping over backwards to do as much as they can to accommodate more and more people to fill in the broken gaps of the system. But the system still can't fit

all of these people, and they're still calling twenty people. Right. I've would have told you before COVID that I probably had ten patients or something that I would go to sleep and worry about of my like hundred and fifty or so. You know, it's not the case anymore. It's

much closer to like over half of them. I would say, I think, you know, part of that is that you're not seeing movement on them improving, and whether that's you know, the men's not working and so you want to change it, or whether that's you can't medicate away a pandemic and you can't medicate away grief, and you can't medicate away job loss and schooling from home and work from home and all of this stuff compounding. Here's another Michigan Diaries

recording about that. I'm just struggling in general with COVID right now because there are a lot of things I haven't processed, Like it's just everything has been so heavy, like it's it's first of all, really hard for me to be UM so isolated from people, Like I never thought of myth as a social person, but during COVID I've realized I still need that contact with people and um, you know, just seeing my friends in person. So that's

been a real struggle for me. UM And so I guess I just really haven't been processing things well, like just not working through my emotions with that are thinking about it a lot. Plenty of people also weren't working from home this last year, including at pharmaceutical companies where employees were busier than ever. Here's Stefan von Sell, the chief executive officer of Maderna. So we were made aware of the virus between Christmas and New Year of UH.

We got the sequence from the Chinese government in January, the tenth put online. By the thirteen of January, we had the vaccine design lockdown on the computer. It was all in Silico. We never touched the physical virus. Forty two days after the team ship to v N I h the vaccine and on March I think the thirteen we started over sixteen. We started dozing UH. In the first phase one at the NA h Uh. July July we started the phase three and December eighteen the vaccine

was authorized by the FD. So in eleven months we went from nothing, not even knowing the sequence of this virus, to getting an authorized vaccine. How could you develop a vaccine so fast? I think it's the question, and I think there's a few things. Because we're in the pandemic, there were a lot of cases. You need people to get sick, and fortunate me to compare to people who got placebo. When we inject the money in people's arm,

we never give them a drug. We give them an instruction, set a piece of code, a piece of software for your body to read that instruction and to make, in

this case, the spect protein of a coronavirus. And when you're gonna make a spect protein yourself in your body, well, your immune system is going to see that protein, which is not natural, it's not a human protein in your body, and so humane system is going to be upset and it's gonna make antibodies so that if later you get a natural infection of the sascovi too virus, you will already have antibody in your body that will bind to the virus, neutralize it and so it will prevent it

from getting inside yourselves to self replicate and make you sick. So was a historic here in terms of getting a money as a first approved product. A few people were even aware of what the money is even in the farmer industry. And I think the world in the next you know Moss waters and els, He's going to start mine well to see the benefit that that people are going to get from many many amany drugs coming to them.

My name is Nita Kadeer. I am a pulmonary critical care physician at U c l A. I'm the co director of the medical I See you and I was the co director for the critical care COVID efforts at U c l A Health busin last year. So I take care of patients when they are critically ill and a native intensive care. I also see them in my follow up clinic um patients who have um them being patients who have survived critical illness and are coming back from follow up. The mainstay of treating ARID s and

treating COVID is still good supportive care. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes we are running to the bedside with a crash cart. Absolutely we're doing that, but yes, a lot of it is preventing complications. So I think supportive care doesn't think that it's due because they people hear it and they think it means like chicken soup and naps, you know.

But a supportive care and the IIC you essentially amounts to supporting the body, often withinvasive measures UM and giving time for healing and avoiding complications while you are supporting the body with these invasive measures and UM. It's that still I think sounds much more simple than it is, but it is actually quite a bit of work. I don't think survival is talked about enough UM, and I I do think there's far too much talk about death.

And this is not to discount death and the over half a million deaths that our country has experienced over the past year UM. But there are many more people who will survive than who will die, and we need to know how to take care of those patients. UM. We need to know what to expect. So UM, when people UM survive in I c U hospitalization, whether it's from COVID or from any other critical illness UM, there

the road to recovery can be long. It is not always for everybody, but it frequently is long you don't you don't leave the i CU the way you went in. UM that that is certainly fair to say so. UM. Sometimes patients go from the ice U to the medical ward to home, but more frequently UM in the setting of needing, you know, needing to be on invasive mechanical ventilation, needing to be on event later there are psychologic issues that they can experience, so anxiety depression PTSD or not

uncommon in the post i c U population. UM. There there's also a lot of a lot of muscular weakness from inactivity, which is one of the big reasons patients need to go to rehabilitation afterwards. My goal initially in the pandemic was just like really trying to lift everyone's spirits, like just go in. It's like I would joke that I would go into the ice U with the energy of hypeman at a hip hop show, like just try to get people like repped up, like we're gonna do this.

We're gonna get people through this, and it's gonna suck, but but we're gonna get we're gonna save some lives and we're gonna be okay. And that level of energy and enthusiasm. It's just really difficult to sustain over months and months and months, and while we were all working

so hard and have seen some difficult things. So in the fall things sort of started dying down and we thought the worst was over, and then December and January happened and it was I mean, whatever little surge we had in UM in the spring summer, it was nothing compared to December and January. In December and January we had to pull in multiple backup teams for quite a long period of time. We had COVID patients in many

I see U s UM. We were using non I c U spaces and converted those two I see you spaces. That was That was pretty rough, because a lot of fatigue had said it at that point, and it just had gotten a whole lot worse. Things have gotten better over the last few weeks, though, I will say considerably better. I certainly did not anticipate that would be dealing with this a year later. I absolutely did not. I remember one of my friends said that back in the spring.

She said, I don't think that's gonna be over until we have a vaccine, And I was like, no, that that just that can't be true. It's gonna be a few months of it's going to be horrible and then it's going to get gradually better. And I mean, and she was absolutely right, because here we are a year later, um, and still dealing with it all um, and at least we have a vaccine now. But that was the first major glimmer of hope for me. This is finally a real signal that there's an end in sight. That was

Emma Court, with additional reporting by Nick Carrello. For more coverage of the Pandemics anniversary, visit bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus. The Prognosis podcast is produced by Tophor foreheads Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Additional help for this episode came from Stephen Merrilman. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening, l