Last month a close friend died from covid that he contracted at his assisted living facility. He was the contact person who I met that introduced me into the organization that I'm still in now, knew him for forty years.
Maybe because I'm in California, but I see 2021 as a year that will be in a continual stay-at-home mode, off and on, throughout the year. It's impossible to plan anything. I'm responsible for planning a big, five hundred person hotel conference event; had to cancel 2020 and forget 2021. I've postponed it to 2025, but even then, who knows if that kind of event is possible even then given the new reality.
I'm trying my best to be responsible and attentive to others. I always wear a mask outside or in a public area. When I have to go to in-person large group meetings with others from out of state, I always test afterward (there's a good, accessible program in Napa). My big fear is what the present situation is doing to our society, it seems as if a generation of students are being lost with the shut downs. Even when schools open, who knows what the quality of their eduction will be, and I don't mean this as a criticism of teachers or school administrations, it's a difficult situation and there's no easy way out. The elderly have it bad, a lot of people out of work, despair is getting more prevalent, who knows where it all lead.
Still, I'm hopeful that things will work out for the good, and eventually, some kind of normalcy will return, hopefully by the summer of 2022.