GREENVILLE, N.C (WNCT) — Wednesday marked four years since the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world as we knew it.
The entire world remembers the chaos from schools, mass shutdowns, heavy mask mandates, and all the lives lost throughout the community. But COVID-19 taught all of Eastern North Carolina how to lean into each other and work together to get through it.
The pandemic moved everyone out of college dorms, made new struggles for law enforcement, and gave us a world without sports. At East Carolina University, online classes were already in effect for a fraction of the student population. When chaos ensued, Associate Provost of Learning Operations, Allen Guidry, said the focus turned to getting the entire population online.
“The obvious immediate ripple effect was related to the instructional space,” he said. “And how we were going to continue to do business at ECU and teach courses in a quality way during this time of chaos and transition.”
The Pitt County Sheriff’s Office adapted to the use of new technology thanks to COVID-19. Sheriff Paula Dance said that Zoom allowed a detainee to interact with a judge during their first court appearance without bringing them into the space.
“Today we can use that technology again,” she said. “If it’s not feasible for an inmate to be brought over.”
Each member of the community learned to fight through adversity, but those in the hospital were fighting adversity in the front lines, including Rebekah Mitchell, who’s a nurse at CarolinaEast Medical Center.
“My job as a manager is to take care of my nurses,” she said.
“And like you know I saw the tired on them. I saw how worn out they were from doing this over and over again. I saw the heartache and the hurt they suffered when they lost a patient, they had taken care of for weeks.”
When COVID made its mark on high school sports in Eastern North Carolina, it happened to be during the beginning of spring sports and basketball state championships. Clay Milden, who is the athletic director at J.H Rose, said it was sad to see seniors have their final season of high school canceled.
“Really heartbreaking obviously especially for the seniors,” he said. “You know for all the people that had, you know, the basketball state championships were happening the next day. Spring sports, we were four or five or six games into the year and then everybody had been geared up for your senior year and then boom it’s cut out from under you.”
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services made a statement about how COVID-19 changed the landscape of health as we know it.
“We are in a different place with COVID-19 than we were during the pandemic. A high percentage of the population has some protective immunity against COVID-19, and we have the tools.”
Although COVID is not necessarily a threat to us anymore, the NCDHHS says to exercise hygiene practices every day, including those we’ve learned from the pandemic, so we never repeat the past.
