Copper Tape
2022-02-11
When the pandemic hit NYC really badly, back in March 2020, my partner read that copper tape was virucidal, particularly so for respiratory diseases. With the poor collective understanding that we all had of the disease, it was unclear how much fomites contributed to the spread of COVID-19, so he ended up buying a roll of copper tape and putting it on all the commonly-touched surfaces within our apartment: faucets, cabinet handles, doorknobs, and so on. The tape stayed there for well over a year.
Several months ago, as the Delta variant was winding down and it felt like the pandemic might actually be over, I suddenly noticed that the copper tape was still all over everything, very slowly starting to oxidize. I thought that there was doubly no point to the tape still being there, as fomites had long since faded as a concern, and the pandemic was waning.
So I started peeling it all off. It was really, really stuck on after numerous instances of being pushed against the surfaces it was stuck onto, but I chipped away at it over across multiple evenings with my fingernails and a toothpick.
Omicron struck, sweeping through the city and country like a wildfire. The overwhelming mood felt like March 2020 again, and I lost the motivation to peel off the final bit of copper tape, wrapped around the entire long refrigerator handle.
And then as quickly as it came, it faded away. At this point, I do not believe that COVID-19 will go away. Variants will keep popping up and all of us will need to keep getting boosted forever. Perhaps over the next few years, it just becomes another disease that we're all used to getting, just like the common cold or the flu. With this understanding, I decided to peel away the rest of the copper tape this evening. For me, the copper tape was a symbol of fear of COVID-19 - a fear that I no longer believe is warranted in its rawest form. The future is one of relative caution and a relatively immunized society, both physically and mentally, but not of despair.
Peeling away the last of it was rather therapeutic. The pandemic may not be over - strictly speaking, it may never be over - but it is over for me in the sense that I (and hopefully many others) have adjusted to the new world and have a toolbox to move forward and do many of the gathering-heavy activities we used to do much more in the before times, and that is good enough for me.