At the end of May, as I was waiting to board a flight from Newark to Geneva, I overheard a high-decibel monologue being delivered by an older American businessman to a fellow passenger of undetermined nationality. The topic of the monologue was the coronavirus, which the American’s daughter – a nurse in New York – had just contracted for the first time since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
The moral of the story, according to the American, was that “everybody’s acting like Corona is done, but it’s not”. Ironically, his own insight did not inspire him to don a face mask either in the airport or on the airplane.
I had just flown from El Salvador to the United States to visit my parents in Kentucky, and from Geneva would continue on to Istanbul and Beirut. The trajectory provided a swift reintroduction to a suddenly mask-less world – in which everyone seemed to be over the pandemic despite the fact that the pandemic was very much not over. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.