It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that it was just five years ago that the entire world was turned upside down. In some ways, it seems so much longer and in others, it feels like just yesterday that we were all washing our mail, rationing Clorox wipes and storming grocery stores like it was the Invasion of Normandy in search of toilet paper.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel published the first “COVID at Five Years” story I’ve seen, although I’m sure there will be more if journalists can find the time and discipline not to chase every “We’re gonna buy Nova Scotia and turn it into a car wash” brain twitch coming out of the White House. In looking back, the MJS hit on some things that COVID ushered into our social conscious:

Beyond the grim health toll, the cultural impact has been substantial. We learned about PPEs and contact tracing. We mark time as “before COVID” and “after COVID.” We use phrases like “jumping on a Zoom call,” talk about “the new normal,” and ask about “curbside pickup.”

More than anything, we felt and discussed isolation. Talk to bartenders or baristas, psychologists or scientists, and it’s as if a larger-than-typical chunk of our population lost, or in the case of young people never developed, the ability to have what once were normal social interactions.

The effects of social isolation on mental health “didn’t have boundaries,” said Dr. Pam Wilson, vice president of medical affairs at Sixteenth Street Community Health Center. “They affected everyone.”

(As I wrote this, the BBC sent along its look at the outbreak, so now I’m up to two articles.)

What people remember is likely a function of where they were living, what stage in life they were at and how directly this virus impacted them personally. I tend to remember some of the dumbest things possible, even as my wife was a nurse and putting herself at risk to make sure people could receive heath care.

I remember sending an email to the guy who ran our monthly baseball card shows right about this time of the month, asking if he had planned to cancel, as things were starting to get weird up here. His initial response was, “Nah, this is all overblown. See you in a couple weeks.”

I didn’t see him again for more than two years.

I also remember watching every university around me starting to close and shift to online learning. My reporting class was getting edgy, as they had a 24-hour Midterm From Hell about to begin. One kid asked me two days before we were about to start it, “What if they shut the university down before this happens?”

“Look, folks, we’re behind people, but I tend to think that if they were going to shut us down, they would have done it by now,” I said.

After class, I opened my email to find the, “We’re going into hibernation, run for the hills” email that got us into distance learning for the year or two.

The rest was a blur of random weirdness, although I have to admit we got really lucky that Amy put us in for monthly toilet paper deliveries about a year earlier and apparently we don’t use as much as Amazon liked to send each month. Before COVID, I was grousing about having to store cases of TP. During COVID, I felt borderline opulent in using the bathroom.

I remember putting together “care packages” for my parents, who would drive up and visit from the other end of the driveway. Extra toilet paper, Clorox wipes, books of puzzles and anything else I could find. I also remember that about two months earlier, my dad and I bought a sports card collection of more than 3 million cards. (No, that’s not a typo. It filled the back of a U-Haul.)

I would pull out boxes of cards and put them with the care package so Dad could keep himself busy by sorting and pricing cards during the pandemic. Given his general twitchiness, I imagine that keeping him plied with cards might have saved his marriage, or even kept my mother from burying him in a shallow grave in the backyard.

The point of this recall is not just to mark time, but also to look for opportunities to do some good reporting now. The obvious stories are things like, “What was it like for us five years ago?”  or “What did we do then that now seems ridiculous?” (Washing the mail comes to mind…)

However, there are now ways to dig into issues like long COVID, digital isolation (why have a meeting when you can have a Zoom?), mental health impacts, changes to education (a snow day apparently is no longer a snow day thanks to distance learning) and other similar changes.

It might also be worth asking what we learned overall from this kind of thing? Whenever I used to hear people talking about majoring in “supply-chain management,” I thought it meant they needed a major and they planned to work for their dad’s company. Now? I know how important that is. Same thing with people who worked in labs and planned for the zombie apocalypse. I have a lot better understanding of why I should care about washing my hands and not licking door knobs.

The point is, now would be a good time to take a retrospective look at what happened and what we now know about life on the other side of the pandemic.

It might even help us avoid another one.