I don’t think it’s an overstatement to describe the COVID-19 pandemic as a collective trauma. It was in Vermont, anyway. Five years ago this week began a chain of history-making events that most of us would rather forget — the psychological term is dissociative amnesia. A new history of Vermont’s experience of the global public health crisis, gleaned from audio interviews conducted by the state historical society, ensures that we will always remember.
In Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont, journalist and author Garrett Graff assembled the first-person testimonies of some Vermonters who vividly recall PCR tests, quarantine, contact tracing, PPE, and slogans such as “Stay home, stay safe” and “Flatten the curve.” Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine, who directed Vermont’s medical response to the virus, is just one of many voices in the collection. He recalls “14-hour days and sleepless nights” filled with worry about keeping hospitals functional, reducing infection risk in long-term care and correctional facilities, and even “How do we make sure people have enough food to eat?”
The first third of the book chronicles the efforts of Levine and other state leaders to understand the threat, develop policies to contain it and communicate those protocols to the public. The tale proceeds to document the impact of the shutdown on everyone else. After providing minimal context at the start of each chapter, Graff gives the floor to caregivers, parents, pastors, town officials, hair stylists, hoteliers, truckers, journalists, midwives and grocery store workers to describe the experience in their own words.
The result is both painful and gripping to read — a testament to its accuracy and Graff’s editing.
We thought about excerpting Life Became Very Blurry as this week’s cover story, but you really have to read the whole thing to appreciate its cumulative power. Instead, Ken Picard wrote a feature about the book and the broader three-year documentary research project.
Seven Days is also part of the story. Last summer, deputy publisher Cathy Resmer and I sat down with veteran journalist Mark Johnson, one of four field interviewers the Vermont Historical Society hired to solicit and collect pandemic stories. At a safe distance from March 13, 2020, we tried to recount the terror of navigating an independent newspaper, then funded almost entirely by advertising, through unprecedented perils: revenue free fall, layoffs, reporting on the pandemic and worker safety, to name a few. Some of our two-hour convo made the cut.
There’s also a chapter in the book about the Converse Home, an assisted-living facility in Burlington, and everything its staffers did to protect their residents — including my mother, who died of cancer there, confined to her room, two and a half months into the pandemic. I shared that experience in real time through this column. While I started writing it to communicate with and reassure our readers, I ended up weaving in what was happening in my own life. I was surprised by how much the personal stuff resonated, whether it was about the importance of getting exercise or memorializing the dead. In some cases, I think I managed to capture the communal experience we were all sharing.
The history project motivated me to go back through the past five years of “From the Publisher” columns in search of the pandemic-related ones. I found 76 that are now part of the historical society’s archive. You can also read them at sevendaysvt.com/pandemic-publisher-series, if you want to relive the drama.
Five years out, Vermont is still grappling with the effects of the pandemic: worker shortages and an outsize homeless population, to name just two. Vermonters in their imposed isolation changed their spending patterns, staying home and buying stuff online — trends that are now doing a number on local businesses.
Including this one. It may not look like it, but Seven Days‘ advertising revenues still have not bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. We also can’t produce some of our previous revenue-generating publications and events. For example, our annual dining guide and Restaurant Week are on indefinite pause because most local food businesses don’t have the money or staff to participate in either.
The COVID-19 crisis may have ended, but Seven Days is one of many Vermont enterprises that hasn’t fully recovered.
We’re forging ahead anyway, pinching pennies and taking advantage of new revenue streams wherever we can find them. The outpouring of reader appreciation and financial support we’ve received has been the best part of the past five years. If you want us to be there for the next five, please keep it coming.
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2025.
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