When Gov. Katie Hobbs declared Monday of this week as COVID-19 Memorial Day in Arizona, I was wondering why she chose March 6. Didn’t then-Gov. Doug Ducey declare the COVID public health emergency on March 12, 2020? 

But the answer was simple: March 6, this year, fell on the first Monday in March — the day each year which will be Arizona’s COVID-19 Memorial Day going forward.

But March 6, 2020, was a huge COVID start date for my family. It was a rainy Friday afternoon immediately preceding spring break when I picked my two little girls up from school and we ran to the car with their St. Patrick’s Day art projects.

I laid out their paper leprechauns and four-leaf clovers on a shelf in the garage to dry, and they remained there for months as a symbol of my kids’ lives being ripped from them: a spring break that went until September, followed by schools that closed and opened for months afterward.

COVID took a toll on my family — from my kids’ emotional problems (caused by them being robbed of a normal school experience for almost two years) — to my dad dying from the virus.

But, through it all, I tried to not go off the deep end in either direction. 

I started out extra cautious. In the first days of COVID, when I arrived home from work, I’d strip to my skivvies in the garage and run to the shower before I had contact with my family. 

Eventually, however, I ended up demanding that my kids’ school open, and the government stop telling businesses to stay closed (and, instead, insist that those who were at high risk be the ones to stay home).

When I got COVID in January of last year, I stayed home so that I didn’t get someone else sick even though the worst complication I had was a sore back from watching the entire Netflix library from bed.

I credit the vaccine for my mild case — so, obviously, I didn’t believe that the shot implanted a microchip in my body.

But almost as crazy to me is that anyone thinks that the COVID-19 coronavirus couldn’t possibly have been released (even accidentally) from the only lab experimenting with coronaviruses located anywhere near (actually in) the Chinese city where the disease was first detected.

I made a promise on the radio last year to not lecture anyone to get vaccinated if people promised to not say crazy crap about the vaccine and cause more old folks to end up like my dad: unvaccinated and dead.

Unfortunately, the era of misinformation came of age during COVID, and it’s what I worry most about from which America may never recover.

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