March 10, 2020.
As I was on my way to meet my buddy Adam Voight for lunch at Chick-fil-A, my wife texted me with an urgent message: “It looks like there’s a run on toilet paper. Better get some!” Then she followed with, “Walmart is out.”
I filed that info away in my noggin and caught up with Adam at Chick-fil-A where servers met customers outside, offering packaged sanitary wipes to anyone who wanted one. Inside, servers were placing antibacterial hand soap containers at the end of the takeout counter and on each table.
Maybe we laughed and smiled about it because we weren’t sure how to react. An awkward, uncomfortable reality was brewing. Thanks to Facebook, I discovered that the Dollar General store at Midway was stocked to the rafters with toilet paper. I stocked up.
The next day, the World Health Organization declared that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 — also known as coronavirus disease or COVID-19 — had become a worldwide pandemic.
Over the next week or so, the world’s economic and social wheels that had never been so unpredictable abruptly grounded to a half. And, as we began redefining the phrase, “The new normal,” on an almost daily basis, something else occurred at blazing, perhaps irreversible speed: We were divided. Isolated by an unseen, unknown virus that demanded immediate attention, the political and social divisions that already separated us in many ways became wide chasms. No thanks to Facebook (and other social media platforms), isolation and fear teamed up to foment suspicion on a scale that matched the new disease.
Our world had changed. I kept an informal journal of the pandemic, and this quote from my bride stands out: “I guess washing our groceries isn’t such a bad idea after all.”
Some of Columbia’s most knowledgeable business and policy voices now say that the shift from brick-and-mortar shopping to online sales was already happening, as was the gradual advent of automation and even artificial intelligence. The things that were trending, however, suddenly responded to the evolving new reality. It seems ironic now that on the outside, the engine of everyday life went idle, though internally the changes were occurring at a rapid-fire pace.
The same was true of the political, social, and economic divisions among us. They were always there. But a silent killer that eventually claimed an estimated 7.1 million lives worldwide — 1.2 million of them in the U.S. as of May 2023 — fueled further division, fanned by social media posts about conspiracy theories and corrupt health and science leaders. The politicization and weaponization of how-dare-you-question misinformation generated a voice loud enough to drown out trustworthy sources and leaders.
I’m not a fence-sitter when it comes to COVID. The disease took my dad’s life on October 8, 2020. I’ve now had seven COVID “jabs” (and a rollicking awful case of COVID back in November). And because I am, for some reason, already susceptible to respiratory infections, I still sometimes wear a mask when I’m out in public. It’s not a political statement. It never was.
This March 2025 issue of COMO Business Times and COMO Magazine has ample mentions of COVID. You have my apology if you have COVID burnout. But it’s still an important topic, and one that we will never escape if only because March 2020 was the start of a period that exacerbated the divisions that already existed.
What are the solutions? Maybe we can remember a time during pre-COVID when we talked to each other in person instead of at each other on social media. Yeah … maybe we could start doing that again.
