Mar. 13—Lawrence firefighter Juan “Manny” Gonzalez had to learn to live with COVID-19, because he got it twice.
The first time was in September 2020, when he confined himself to his basement for two weeks so his wife wouldn’t get sick. After his cough and fever subsided, Gonzalez still tested positive for close to two months, and then had to get therapy for his breathing.
“The last thing you want is to catch a fire with half your lungs, so the doctor kept me out of work,” he said. “The therapy did work out for me.”
The second time he got COVID-19 was this January, but he had milder symptoms and only required five days of isolation.
“I truly believe this was basically a learning experience for us all,” Gonzalez said. “I am feeling grateful and I’m also being more careful on how I do things, modifying behavior on a daily basis.”
That has included wearing a mask, social distancing and hand washing, along with getting vaccinated. He has also adjusted the way he works for Heal Lawrence, the non-profit that he co-founded to help the victims of fires in Lawrence.
“That was tough, because to help people, bring them food, gift cards, we had to modify everything,” Gonzalez said. “Even just to give them a gift card, we had to put them on the front door. The office wasn’t open. It was tough for victims. We just had to modify things and keep moving.”
Kim Lyng, who is now an associate professor of Liberal Arts at Northern Essex Community College, credits her 15 years in journalism with helping her adapt during the pandemic.
“It’s a job where you have to roll with the punches a lot and deal with it,” she said. “It’s amazing how it shaped you, with this adaptability and moving in different directions.”
Those skills came in handy in March of 2020 after classes were halted by the pandemic, before resuming remotely a few weeks later, following a week of spring break.
With help from staff at the Center for Instructional Technology at Northern Essex, faculty started communicating with students through a mixture of Zoom sessions, PowerPoint presentations and online lectures, while posting assignments in Blackboard, a content management system.
“For the most part, people jumped in and did what they could,” Lyng said. “People were very nimble. It went as well as it could.”
Then that summer, faculty received intensive training from CIT staff in how to design online courses, and Lyng was appointed to a committee that addressed online learning, which was the subject of her dissertation.
What she had learned from her research, Lyng said, is that “the more you communicate with and support students, the more they are likely to be successful.”
Armed with that knowledge and their new training, professors were able to offer online courses beginning in the fall of 2020 that were “a lot more robust than we had done in the spring,” Lyng said.
While some in-person classes have resumed at the college since the fall of 2021, other classes are still remote, and faculty are now prepared to work in either mode.
“Everybody is getting through it the best way possible under current circumstances,” Lyng said.
She said her naturally positive attitude has been another important element in helping her adapt, and that viewpoint was also singled out by Craig Gibson, a lay Catholic chaplain at Lawrence General Hospital.
“Is the sun coming out again? You bet,” he said. “The number of COVID patients has gone down significantly. The severity of the cases has been diminishing. I think patients and families and staff members want to be incredibly hopeful. They want to be renewed in a fresh sense of hope that this is finally going to subside.”
Working at the hospital, Gibson has seen the “extraordinary experience” that patients, families and staff members have been through every day for the past two years.
“The most important thing is to listen and understand that experience the families have been through, the patients have been through, and also staff members,” he said. “They’ve been heroic in their front-line service to others.”
The pandemic has also been cruel in the way it has unfolded, “an extraordinary roller coaster for all of us.”
“If we roll the clock back to last fall, we had plenty of reason to believe the worst might have been behind us,” Gibson said. “From November until weeks ago, we went through another spike, with no way of knowing if the end is in sight.”
But as someone who has noticed that spring is about return, he also knows that there may be a better future in store.
“The sun is out, the temperatures are warming,” Gibson said. “I can tell you the birds are singing every morning, and with this may be a new season of greater hope for many of us.”
Learning to live with COVID-19 is something that the whole world has had to do, because the virus isn’t disappearing, in spite of recent drops in case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths.
There are always other variants of the virus in circulation, which the CDC classifies as variants of interest or variants of concern, depending on the level of threat that they pose.
“When you go from interest to concern, that raises a lot of red flags, if you will,” said Dr. Howard Koh of Andover, professor at T.H. Chan School for Public Health at Harvard. “Right now, it’s quiet. You just never know when the next variant of concern will be. Last summer, we had a very quiet time. We were hoping this would be behind us, then Delta and Omicron emerged.”
Given the “shockingly low” levels of vaccination in other countries, Koh said, a new variant can “pop up anywhere around the world and become a global problem overnight.” The only hope is that new variants of concern may be less contagious and harmful than past versions, which could allow them to be classified as endemic.
“Endemic really means it’s persistent, but at a low, steady state, something like the flu, as an example,” Koh said. “We’ll never eliminate or eradicate the flu, and it has times of year when it arises and we need special vigilance and vaccination and public health measures, but it doesn’t overwhelm the hospitals or the health care system the way COVID has.”
The flu changes every year, requiring the development of new vaccines to match the threats that they pose, although the results are sometimes mixed.
“It’s a dynamic process,” Koh said. “You can’t assume anything. This is where excellent surveillance at all times is critical for public health world wide. We have to be much better prepared than we have been.”
That’s why Koh hopes that officials will use this moment of dropping case loads to repair a public health system that was already underfunded, before it was badly stressed by the pandemic.
“Our good health is a gift and it’s fragile and we have to protect it with the power of prevention,” he said. “I hope everyone has learned that, in our third year of COVID.”
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