The severity and uncertainty of the novel coronavirus sent workers and students home to shelter in place five years ago. As restrictions lifted and COVID-19 mutated, the virus re-surged and many people who had avoided it tested positive for the first time. Even now, the coronavirus is circulating the community, but three people from Bloomington-Normal said, as far as they know, they’ve never had COVID.
“When I heard there was going to be a shut down, I was at my mother’s assisted living facility in north central Arkansas,” said Paula Aschim from Bloomington. Aschim was her mother's primary caretaker and wasn't prepared to leave when stay-at-home orders were issued.
“That was a stressful time, not knowing what was next,” she said. “But I got back home to Illinois and we shut down.”
Aschim and her husband are both over 65 and knew age was a risk factor. So, they took the precautions seriously and got vaccinated at the first opportunity. Aschim says her life didn't change too dramatically. She and her husband canceled their gym memberships and lost a few plane tickets. When they got stir crazy, they took road trips instead of flying.
“It clearly was taking many forms,” said Aschim. “It was interesting to me to see how it was respiratory and vascular—and neurological even. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it because person to person you didn’t know how it was going to affect you. So I chose not to find out.”
It was Aschim's dental hygienist who pointed out how unusual it was to have never gotten the virus. Aschim says she feels privileged to have been in a situation where she could make choices about her health.
“We’re retired. We weren’t front line workers or someone who had to be out. We were very lucky, I feel, to be able to avoid small spaces with a lot of people.”
There were trade-offs. Aschim continued to care for her mom, who was 95 at the time, remotely, mostly by phone. Residents at the care facility were confined to their rooms. Aschim would call during a favorite television program so they could watch it together, hundreds of miles apart.
Mary Bonczkowski, of Bloomington, is a retired accountant who volunteers with Volunteer Income Tax Assistance [VITA], an organization which helps seniors and low-income adults with filing their taxes.
“We had tax appointments scheduled for the whole year,” she said, and the shutdown came in the middle of tax season. “We had to turn everybody down.”
VITA volunteers started seeing clients again in June to help people meet the extended 2020 deadline. Bonczkowski lived alone at the time and she wore a mask when in public. She took advantage of the early morning hours at grocery stores reserved for seniors. Her church activities moved online, with the occasional exception of bell choir.
“When we opened back up, everybody was masked. The ones that didn’t want to mask didn’t stay in the bell choir,” she said.
Bonczkowski wonders if her luck will last. Her son moved in with her after losing his home in Hurricane Helene. They live on separate floors of their home, but his job as a massage therapist puts him in close contact with a lot of people.
“I got my first cold a couple weeks ago in probably 20 years,” she said. “I tested to see, well, is it finally COVID? No, it was just your run-of-the-mill cold.”
Kelly Bertran tests often and is confident her three-person household in Normal has never contracted coronavirus. Bertran has several auto-immune disorders and takes medication that suppresses her immune system. So, it was vitally important that she and her family took precautions to keep COVID out of their home. Bertran works from home. Her husband and child don't.
“The rule is you come in the house, shoes are off and you wash your hands,” she said.
That's something they lived by since before the pandemic. When the virus was most severe, Bertran kept windows cracked, no matter the weather. And they didn't eat together as a family. That's something she says she missed the most.
“I’m trying to recall the first time we ate at a restaurant,” she said. “Honestly it wasn’t that long ago. Those are the cards we’re dealt, and you just suck it up, buttercup, I guess.”
The trade-offs are especially worth it for Bertran, who is likelier to become extremely ill if she contracts COVID-19. She discovered she likes working from home and mostly still does. She opted for stay-cations at first and has slowly resumed some of her favorite activities. A silver lining has been her routine walks outside and noticing others who found joy in nature during the pandemic.
“It was the right thing to do, and I stayed healthy. We all stayed healthy—except for this year,” she said.
It was the flu. And it was bad. Bertran said five years after the pandemic, there’s still a stigma around mask use and social distancing. No one is going to be blowing out candles in the Bertran house, but things outside their home have essentially gone back to normal. That makes it harder for her and other immunocompromised people with “invisible illnesses” to fully participate in society.
“If you’re sick, stay home,” she said. “Just don’t spread it around. You don’t know who you might be sitting with or walking with or in contact with. Just be respectful of that.”
