One of the earliest clues of how the Covid-19 pandemic would change life in Vermont was an offhand remark uttered during a press conference on March 5, 2020.
While state officials described plans to prepare schools, hospitals and nursing homes for a potential outbreak, Dr. Mark Levine, the state’s health commissioner, mentioned a likely side effect of the new virus. “The custom of handshaking is probably going to fade away as a result of this crisis,” he said.
Levine’s comment revealed a gulf between the possible outcomes. On the one hand, there was the need to contain the virus; on the other, an upending of the most basic social norms. That gulf would quickly narrow.
The coronavirus was already, invisibly, crossing Vermont’s borders.
Just two days later, on March 7, Gov. Phil Scott and a group of state officials stood before a crowd of reporters at the State Emergency Operations Center in Waterbury to announce that a hospital patient in Bennington had tested positive for Covid-19.
For many in the room, it would be among the last times they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a colleague or stranger for months. Over the next several days, a cascade of event cancellations and business closures created a sudden sense of chaos.
Toilet paper and hand sanitizer began disappearing from grocery store shelves, along with staples like flour and beans.
The Bennington case was only the first to be recorded, picked up by the Health Department at a time when the state’s laboratory could run just dozens of tests per day. An unknowable number of people were already spreading the virus — to their workplaces, to their households, to cheering spectators at a University of Vermont basketball game attended by thousands. Despite locking their doors to visitors, long-term care facilities would face rapid, deadly outbreaks within days.
On Friday, March 13, Scott announced a limit on mass gatherings, urging Vermonters to work from home and avoid travel. “There is no doubt,” he said, “these are difficult steps that, for a few weeks, or possibly months, will change what we do in our daily lives.”
The state of emergency the governor declared that afternoon continues to this day.
‘All ideas welcome’
Mari Cordes had a sense of what was coming. Cordes is a cardiology nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center and a state representative from Lincoln with experience in disaster relief. From both the hospital and the Legislature, she saw early signs of a widespread emergency.
On March 9, two days after Scott announced the state’s first positive case, Cordes started a Facebook group titled “How Can I Help #prepare,” described as “a place to crowdsource how we can help our neighbors, especially those that are unable to leave their home to stock up on meds, meals and other supplies. Town by town Google docs? Slack? Facebook? All ideas welcome.”
Within 24 hours, Cordes said, she realized it was more than a brainstorming project. The page became a clearinghouse for information on local volunteer efforts, public announcements, news articles and the latest health guidance Cordes could get from her workplaces. Within two weeks, more than 7,000 people had joined.
The page took hold amid an outpouring of ad hoc support. Mutual aid groups blossomed, offering services like food and prescription delivery to those in need. Homemade signs celebrating health workers and grocery store employees were posted along roads and streets. Volunteers made thousands of face masks, gave away bread and vegetables and repurposed idle 3-D printers to make protective gear. Local distilleries pivoted from producing gin and whiskey to hand sanitizer.
Cordes’ group connected like-minded helpers. It also gave members an outlet to share their feelings. “How are you all doing? How are you holding up?” began another member’s post on March 15. “It’s OK to be frightened. I just want you to know we are all here to help one another, and we are going to try our best.” There were 119 responses.
Keeping up the page was “a lot,” Cordes said recently, “and at times very heartbreaking because people were in such very difficult situations. Some still are.”
After several months, she realized maintaining the page was unsustainable. Other administrators picked up the slack.
“There’s no one of us that needs to bear more than they can handle while trying to help,” Cordes said.
At the time, she didn’t anticipate the pandemic would be a yearlong crisis. “I’m a little bit chagrined,” she said. “I think I didn’t have that perspective yet because I was so focused on what was in front of me wherever I was working, and not the long-range view. And in retrospect, it completely makes sense that we’re where we are right now.”
Vermont as an outlier
The one-year anniversary of Covid arrives during a disturbing winter wave of infection. Beginning with an October outbreak at an ice rink in Montpelier, then continuing over Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, daily case averages have risen to peaks more than four times what the state posted in early 2020. (Since testing was minimal in March and April, the true extent of the first wave remains unknown.)
The surge followed months of relative calm. For much of last spring and summer, Vermont was a spot of green in a sea of orange and red on maps showing infection rates across the U.S. At the peak of the nation’s second wave in late July, the hardest hit states were averaging more than 400 new daily cases per million people. Vermont averaged 14.
The high marks have drawn attention from national and global media. Numerous articles recount how Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared with Gov. Scott in September and called Vermont “a model for the country.” Experts ascribed the state’s success to Scott’s leadership as a political moderate, to the administration’s proactive adoption of preventive measures, and to a folksy spirit of cooperation.
“Picturesque and unpolarised: how Vermont crushed the coronavirus,” reads the headline of a recent story in the Sydney Morning Herald.
These accounts give credit where it’s due. But they obscure a contradiction: that the more that Vermonters have done to prevent illness and death, the more our day-to-day lives have been upended.
Scott, a Republican, acknowledged this tension in an interview with VTDigger in May 2020. The first wave of cases had subsided, but the economic destruction remained. “Sometimes you’re a victim of your own success,” he said.
Avoiding Covid has caused incalculable stress. Students have lost the stability of in-person education for two school years running. Drug overdoses have skyrocketed, and advocates worry that domestic abuse is dangerously underreported. Tens of thousands of Vermonters remain out of work — most of them women — and with businesses struggling or closing, many workers won’t have jobs to come back to once restrictions are lifted. Those who live and work in nursing homes remain both uniquely vulnerable to the virus and subject to some of the strictest lockdowns.
Still, more than 200 Vermonters have died. For surviving friends and relatives, there is no discrete beginning or end to the pandemic — it has changed their lives forever.
For others, the end is in sight. Vaccinations have begun, and case counts are stabilizing, if not quite receding. But a weary population recognizes that the crisis is not over yet — and that some of the effects may never completely disappear.
Distancing at the dump
Brenda Field was enjoying her retirement when the pandemic hit. As a career firefighter with the Vermont Air National Guard — for years the only woman to hold the job — she would commute to Colchester from Tunbridge twice a week for 24-hour shifts on the base.
Field retired five years ago and took up wood carving as a hobby. That’s probably what she’d be doing now, she said, if she hadn’t been tapped to lead the emergency response in Tunbridge.
For months last year, every day started with a call from the town’s selectboard chair, “with cows mooing in the background as he got ready to milk.” Tunbridge had spent the previous year updating its emergency response plan, she said, but the pandemic wasn’t the event they were preparing for.
Town leaders’ challenge early on was getting information out to the rural community. Broadband and cell service in the region is “real hit and miss,” Field said.
They went analog. With the help of federal funds, the state installed an LED road sign at the entrance of the village to flash messages about Covid.
Meanwhile, Field and her team masked up and hit the dump. “Almost everybody has to go to the dump,” she reasoned. They stood back from cars and talked to residents about social distancing or helped them with administrative issues while the town offices were closed.
If someone refused to wear a mask, Field made them wait until the dump cleared out to take their turn.
“I think people were pretty appreciative to have a face that could either agree with or say, you know, ‘this is all a hoax,’” she said. Most were happy to follow the rules.
Local volunteers contacted everyone in town who lived alone or might be at risk. They shopped for neighbors and helped get the word out, Field said, “just kind of like touching everybody in town: ‘OK, what do you need? What do you need to know?’”
A year later, Field said, the basic precautions have become second nature. But the longevity of the crisis has been trying.
“This pandemic isn’t like, you know, an active shooter in our school — behavior where you have an intense period of time and then you recover,” she said. “This has been a long, quiet, stay-in-place thing.”
Mari Cordes compared the pandemic to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, “something that happened really suddenly, to a country whose physical infrastructure and social infrastructure during that time was not strong.”
Vermont’s emergency response system was robust, she said, but the virus poses a different type of challenge from a natural disaster. A pandemic isn’t localized like an earthquake or a weather event, so there is less opportunity to funnel resources to a specific area.
It’s also spread out over time. A destructive winter storm, for example, causes damage over a period of days. The pandemic is more like a constant risk of black ice on the roads, an invisible danger that has now lingered for a year.
“There’s a problem of endurance for everyone working in this,” Cordes said. “Here we are a year later, and people are tired. People are hurting. People are lonely, stressed about money.”
What could be considered “recovery” is only just beginning, she said.
‘It’s everyone.’
Dr. Cath Burns works in crisis counseling. After Tropical Storm Irene caused severe flood damage across the state in 2011, Burns’ team got a list of people needing assistance. They’d go to people’s homes, knock on the door and talk to them.
With Covid, that’s impossible — the damage is too widespread.
“It’s everyone. It’s you, it’s me, it’s everyone,” she said. “Not just that we’re all in it, and let’s all hold hands and figure it out. But that we’re all in it, and we’re really struggling with the stressors — even if we don’t think that we are.”
Burns is now the clinical director for Covid Support VT, a FEMA-funded counseling program that’s currently slated to operate through June. Part of her job entails leading workshops to help Vermonters strategize about their self-care. She starts each session by telling participants that they are not alone. According to research by the American Psychological Association, 78% of adults report that the pandemic is a significant source of stress in their lives.
“I guess I’d like people to cut themselves a little bit of slack,” she said.
Covid has warped what disaster researchers call a recovery curve, Burns said. After a tragic event, there’s a phase of positivity. “Everybody rallies and tries to deal with the event. They’re like, ‘we can get through this.’” Then, the pits. “Thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is never going to get better.’” Soon after, people improve and find a new normal.
A year into the pandemic, we’re still in that middle phase, Burns said.
“We don’t see a clear end,” she said. “It’s not like after the flood when your house is rebuilt, or when your family’s able to move. It’s not clear what the end will look like. We’re all kind of trying to figure that out together.”
Hunkering down
Like the onset of the pandemic, there was no clear start date to the second wave. But Nov. 13 marked a turning point. Eight months after Scott declared the state of emergency, the governor prohibited gatherings between members of different households.
The timing could not have been worse. Some had purchased Thanksgiving turkeys and planned get-togethers in accordance with the state’s already byzantine travel restrictions. Worse, indoor gathering spaces were cast as a threat just as outdoor temperatures began to plummet. A long winter loomed.
Julie Brisson was arriving home from surgery when the order came down.
In March, she had been among the thousands who made connections in Cordes’ Facebook group. Brisson lives alone in St. Johnsbury, and past health issues make her vulnerable to infection.
“A friend of mine that’s an RN says, ‘Julie, you get this, you’re gonna die,’” she said.
Most of Brisson’s neighbors are elderly — her building primarily rents to those 55 and older, and several residents are in their 90s. Brisson, 61, has used a wheelchair or walker since she survived a near-fatal bacterial infection in 2015. She needs to live in a building with ramps and an elevator.
Brisson is terrified that she might bring the virus home.
“How do you live with yourself if you know that you went to a Super Bowl party, or you went to a Christmas gathering, and you killed your neighbors? Or you made them very sick?” she said. “That’s what a lot of us here fear.”
In isolation, Brisson bonded with group members on Facebook over cat memes and politics. Some became good friends, although she hasn’t met anyone in person. The online connections were crucial, she said, at a time when she felt like she was withdrawing from the world.
“I didn’t leave my house except for a medical appointment,” Brisson said. She dressed up for each doctor’s visit — a rare opportunity to wear clothes other than sweatpants. “I didn’t go to the store, I didn’t go to the post office, I didn’t go to the drugstore. Nothing,” she said. “I felt like a prisoner.”
As the first wave of cases subsided and the weather warmed, Brisson found relief. She would sit on the front porch and greet neighbors and home health aides as they came and went.
But in August, Brisson got bad news: She had breast cancer. Somehow the news didn’t surprise her, but her calmness did. Five months into the pandemic, “my emotions were stunted,” she said. “It was like, ‘Well, if the Covid doesn’t get me, maybe the breast cancer will. Or if that gets me, well, at least I won’t have Covid.’”
Her doctor initially diagnosed the cancer as non-invasive and simple to treat, but after a series of unsuccessful procedures, she underwent a mastectomy.
Following her surgery, Brisson’s small world got even smaller. She can no longer tolerate quiet like she used to. She keeps the radio or TV on, rewatching Hallmark movies or episodes of “Law and Order: SVU.” Living in a building with other people helps, she said — even if one doesn’t socialize with others, it’s comforting to hear noise at night.
Only recently — with news of the vaccine and signs that President Joe Biden would manage the pandemic better than his predecessor — has Brisson felt some hope.
“I spent a lot of time not sleeping and feeling like crap and being worried. And finally, I just was like, ‘Julie, snap out of this,’” she said. “One of the things they tell you with cancer is outlook. You know, if you’re sitting here thinking about how awful everything is, that’s really not going to be successful to your recovery.”
Brisson has found that small changes in her routine can lift her out of depression. Lately, she’s been taking care of her neighbor’s Shih Tzu, Fenway. “You cannot look at this dog’s face and not be happy,” she said. “It’s like he rescued me.”
Brisson has continued to connect neighbors and online contacts with resources, food and companionship. But she’s also found herself more often asking for help when she needs it. Both have kept her grounded over long stretches of solitude.
“You wonder, are those connections with people going to be broken by this Covid quarantine, or are they going to be strengthened?” she asked. “So far, I would say mine are strengthened.”
Grief unresolved
The second wave escalated, quickly turning deadlier than the first. Dozens died at nursing homes in Rutland and Burlington, the most severe of more than 30 long-term care outbreaks during the fall and winter. More Vermonters died from Covid in December than in the first nine months of the pandemic combined.
For Rae Rappold, whose husband, Mike, died from Covid last March, the resurgence was a reminder of her own grief.
“There is not a very bright light for us at the end of the tunnel,” she said. “There are 400-some-odd thousand of us whose lives will never be the same.”
Rappold believes she and Mike contracted the virus at the UVM men’s basketball game on March 10. Both experienced symptoms, but only Mike, who also had a chronic respiratory disease, died. He was an avid skier and a devoted husband; the pair were friends for two decades before they got together.
Both had sons from previous marriages, and Rae’s three boys now live out of state and work in-person jobs that prevent them from quarantining for travel. She hasn’t seen them since they visited for a small outdoor memorial for Mike in September.
“When I’m alone in this house, I’m alone. Nobody’s allowed to come here,” she said. “Christmas alone. Thanksgiving alone.”
Rappold said she supports the governor and the restrictions. But for her, they serve as a reminder of how persistent the crisis has been. She is planning a proper memorial service for July in the hopes that the restrictions will be lifted by then.
Rappold commended Scott for ordering flags to be lowered to half-staff on the 19th of every month, a statewide reminder of those who lost their lives.
“Mike would have loved that honor,” she said.
Rappold tries to photograph the tribute at a different location every month. Her pictures now show the changing seasons: leaves turning red behind a flag in Jeffersonville in September, snow piled in front of the Cambridge Fire Department in December.
“Never in my wildest dreams would I think that we would still be where we are. Never,” she said.
Marking time
Brenda Field, the Tunbridge official who had spread the word about Covid at the local dump, soon found herself explaining that the town’s flagship gathering would be called off. In May, organizers canceled the Tunbridge World’s Fair for the first time since World War II and the third time in its 148-year history. The annual event brings tens of thousands of visitors from across the region to the town of 1,100.
Field said that for locals, the decision represented a unique kind of loss. The fair is how the town marks time. “It’s a get-together for everybody before winter hits. It’s a wrapping up of the whole year,” she said.
Residents had mixed emotions but felt that they were doing the right thing.
“Most everybody realized we didn’t really want to have that flood of people all intermingling and ending up in what we now call a super spreader,” Field said. “They just regretted not having that rhythm.”
She worries about what will happen if the fair is canceled for another year.
While the pandemic has fostered solidarity, every community and every person has had a singular experience of the crisis.
An out-of-work carpenter in the Northeast Kingdom spent the year watching his mailbox for delayed unemployment and stimulus payments. A “long hauler” in Brattleboro found herself fighting both lingering Covid symptoms and a persistent undercurrent of fear. A refugee from Burundi lived with his family in four different hotels, scrambling to keep his children sheltered while the pandemic kept them out of schools. A funeral director in Burlington handled the first body of a person killed by Covid in Vermont, then spent the year helping families grieve over Zoom. A teen in Northfield, embarking on a career in health care, reflected on her chosen path after spending weeks at the center of a nursing home outbreak.
“It’s clear that we are now in a race,” Health Commissioner Mark Levine said on Feb. 16, the day after Gov. Scott extended Vermont’s state of emergency for the 12th month. Levine was referring to the effort to slow transmission and vaccinate more people while the virus continues to mutate and spread.
Each of the people in this series is in a race of their own, to see the crisis recede before some turning point. Before they need to move away to seek better job prospects. Before they begin yet another disrupted school year. Before they gather family for a long-delayed funeral. Before their business can no longer balance its books. Before the next Tunbridge Fair. Whether or not they will win depends on what happens in Covid’s second year.