My parents would have been stunned by the COVID-19 pandemic that began in this country in 2020.

My grandparents wouldn’t have been.

They saw it before. In 1918, the world suffered through an influenza pandemic that killed tens of millions of people – the exact number isn’t known. One third of the people in the world came down with it. The worst of it lasted until 1920.

Over the years, there have been other breakouts. But people thought the epidemiology had advanced and minimized the damage. Outbreaks of Avian flu and Ebola in this century were kept under control by international intervention and swift vaccination.

We weren’t as lucky in 2020. 

Maybe lucky is the wrong word. Because one problem we had in 2020 was that knuckleheads ran the world’s most powerful nations.

In China, where the pandemic began in the city of Wuhan, Xi Jinping’s totalitarian rule couldn’t stop the virus. And because of his suspicion of outsiders, the world knew little about what was going on in the country of origin.

But the real cetriolo who botched COVID was, no surprise here, Donald Trump.

Trump thought ignoring the spreading virus would make it go away. Otherwise, he feared that his efforts to turn the economy around – vital in an election year – would go for naught.

So there was no sense of urgency in his administration about the virus. And because he wanted to will it out of existence – and not signal weakness to his lunkhead supporters – the United States found itself overwhelmed by cases by the end of March 2020.

The nation was forced to shut down in a way none of us ever imagined. The streets of major cities were deserted. Schools closed. People worked from home – or lost their jobs entirely. Major events were canceled.

Trump held these inane briefings, at one of which he speculated about the possibility of injecting bleach into people to fight the virus. He refused to wear a mask – and his followers did the same, saying that it was an infringement on their freedom and not a proven method of helping to prevent the spread.

So we had refrigerator trucks brought in as makeshift morgues, the sadness of health care workers working long hours to save and then losing their lives from exposure to the disease.

It was a horrible time that none of us will soon forget. Nearly 1.2 million Americans – and nearly 8 million people around the world – died from COVID-19. The outbreak is ongoing, but people seem to have decided to live their lives – in large part thanks to the COVID vaccine that so many Americans and others around the world have taken.

My parents didn’t live to see COVID. My Mom died in November 2019, a few months before the world shut down. It would have been bewildering to her. 

Come to think of it, it’s still a little bewildering to us.