PERRY: Polis commutes Coloradans’ pandemic sentences, giving us probationary ‘normal’

After two years of pandemic pandemonium, I’m not sure what to do with Gov. Jared Polis’ assurance that the coronavirus pandemic has evolved to the point that we can return to “normal.”

I’m wondering how to get back there.

Polis and state health officials on Friday paved the road ahead for all of us. It’s a road, they say, that takes us out of the life and strife we’ve all suffered through since March of 2020. The announcement coincided with news from the CDC that masking for many Americans is now unnecessary. 

If that leaves you feeling like someone huddling in a bunker when the shelling suddenly stops, I’m with you.

Blink, blink, blink.

About 14 Colorado residents died from COVID-19 over the last week. But a year ago, about 70 people across the state were dying each week. State health experts say those new numbers are close to the risk and results of the annual flu season.

Polis and a lot of health officials we’ve put our faith in over the past few years are all saying that based on the science and the numbers and mostly the vaccine, it’s OK to come out now.

Of course it could all end again with a new variant or a new surge through old territory. Despite releasing us from pandemic isolation, Polis and state officials are stocking up and preparing for the worst, if it happens again.

It’s a happy tune whistled in a pretty scary graveyard.

I’ve been in the this bunker, alone, every single day in this newsroom since March 6, 2020. That’s the day a staffer here left on his desk calendar as he packed up and moved to a home office, along with everyone but me.

As sorry as I’ve felt for myself in having to navigate a virtual tsunami in a sea of chaos, I’m still here. 

My pal since kindergarten, Artie Gonzales, didn’t make it. Healthy, happy and following all the pandemic rules of good behavior, he contracted COVID-19 just days before he would have been eligible for a vaccine and died in less than a week. It was a year ago this week that he died.

So did my journalism-school chum and cynic-in-arms Laurence Washington. COVID-19 took him, too, before the vaccine was there. His friendship and decades of camaraderie are gone. Memories of laughing with him until it hurt, reliving the antics of the times we lived and the stories we wrote are just some of the specters I spend time with every day in this newspaper ghost ship.

For two years, I’ve stared almost solely at the world through a Zoom meeting, asking questions and getting quotes from people in sentences syncopated by not-ready-for-prime-time technology.

Over the months and years of chaos, I’ve grown accustomed to missing the incredible friends and acquaintances that took up so much of my time before the pandemic.

And despite all this, despite having my brain prodded through my nose god-only-knows how many times and fretting over every cough and sniffle, it’s time to just let it go and return to normal? 

Just like that? We’re free to go? Wow.

Polis said on Friday that “normal” means that if you’re reasonably healthy, vaxxed and boosted you can, without fear or shame, actually go to the grocery store — without a mask.

I don’t think I can do it. It isn’t like I’ve stayed out of stores and restaurants. But like a good soldier, I mask up outside endless doors, oblivious to much of what’s around me as my glasses fog up.

From the beginning, the science and the messages were clear that masks were effective at preventing transmission, not so much protecting against personal infection.

I get that, as the omicron variant permeated our world, the cheap, blue masks that I don like socks every day offer me even less protection from infection.

Almost like an amulet, I feel like it warded off ugly stares from people like myself, resentful at those who couldn’t care less about whether they were infecting others around them, sentencing people like my friend Artie to death, for the sake of “patriot freedom.”

“Don’t feel guilty,” Polis said Friday.

That’s going to be hard. I guess this is sort of what survivor syndrome is about.

Almost 1 million Americans aren’t here to crawl back toward normal. Millions more are permanently scarred by lingering illness, or desperately missing someone they loved and needed.

Millions have lost jobs, fortunes, businesses, homes and the confidence that here in the United States, we can handle anything that comes our way.

I desperately want to leave all that behind. And, having closely watched and grilled the people in charge of managing the pandemic for two years, I trust them.

But in a world where Vladimir Putin rolls into Europe like Adolph Hitler and some prominent Republicans cheer him on, I feel like I can’t trust anything. Yet.

So for a week or so, I’ll continue to cover my air holes but maybe linger in the candy aisle instead of race through it. I’ll hug some people I’ve wanted to for a very long time instead of offering up an awkward bonk with my knuckles.

If that goes well, and my next several home tests are negative despite my predictable coughs and waves of exhaustion, I think I’ll go to a bar, and sit at it.

Maybe I’ll go to a show, something that would appeal only to pandemic paranoids and likely extra-vaxxers like myself.

Ted Nugent is out.

And I can see myself walking to a table in my favorite Mexican bistro without a mask, I guess. I just won’t make eye contact.

I can see myself letting most of this go long enough to worry about climate change, spiraling inflation, traffic, Tucker Carlson propaganda and its victims, and whether the snow will be any good when I get up far enough above tree line to make some turns.

That sounds pretty normal, and it sounds pretty good.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com