Navigating a complete unknown

The arts helped keep humanity from falling apart. (Left) A still from the Broadway play Hamilton, which was released on streaming platforms in 2020.

- Rachel Lopez

No book or film prepared us for 2020. We had watched blockbusters about asteroid hits, zombie apocalypses, food wars, fury roads and robot revolutions. We'd even watched movies about global pandemics. They all involved movement, action, purpose.

No director thought to make a movie about a virus that forces the global population to simply stay frozen in place, oscillating between paranoia and boredom.

So, from the start, the virus tested our ideas of our world.

When the World Health Organization announced how Covid-19 spread, some people chose to mask up, wash their hands and avoid crowds. Others didn't. Amid streams of new data, we each had to decide who we believed, and how we navigated our relationships with those who believed differently.

As the weeks stretched out, the decisions became more vital, and more intricate.

If the virus hit older people harder, was a cooped-up child's morning walk worth the risk to the life of his grandmother?