Today marks the one year anniversary of Kobe Bryant’s death. This would likely be headline news if we were not in the middle of a pandemic, and if the House had not delivered articles for the impeach of former president Trump to the Senate last night.
The story of Bryant’s death was headline news on this day last year, and the days that followed. The headline in USA Today was, “Kobe Bryan, daughter among 9 killed in crash”. On the left side panel of the front page a secondary article went seeming unnoticed. The title of the article read, “Rush is on to develop vaccine for coronavirus.”
By this time, Wuhan was three days into a complete lockdown due to the coronavirus. Inconsistent stories leaked out of China. The coronavirus would not be major headline news in the US for another couple of weeks.
Looking back, the virus was a fairly common topic of conversation at work. The conversations were not a fear that there would be a pandemic in the United States. The conversations were more out of a concern of what was really happening in China, and some concerns that people had around traveling to Canada for work. One of my coworkers is married to someone from China, and the stories they had through people they know back in China were terrifying. I do not think that we will ever know what really happened in China.
As Americans, on this day in 2020, we went about our ordinary lives. We could not have imagined what 2020 had in store for us.