Ramin's Space: Marking Pandemic Year 2 while celebrating the Persian New Year and the beginning of spring
A bittersweet holiday brings some hope, too.
Happy Persian New Year! Nowruz, mobarak! For Iranians, Iranian Americans and the rest of the diaspora, it’s the most important holiday. But it’s also a bittersweet one, marking the end of the first COVID-19 pandemic year and the beginning of the second one. We missed our extended family and friends once again. “Their seats are empty,” to paraphrase a Persian expression.
It feels a bit depressing celebrating the Persian New Year by ourselves again, as we’ve tried to confine ourselves to social isolation, like so many others. But the holiday also heralds the beginning of spring. (It’s not a coincidence: since Zoroastrian times, many Persian holidays have coincided with the seasons.) “Nowruz,” or نوروز, literally means “new day.” Like every spring, we’re already beginning to see blooming flowers and trees in our neighborhood, but this time especially feels like one of rebirth, revival and rejuvenation.
I might not have my shot at a vaccine for a couple months, but I can look forward to it now. I sense a growing kernel of hope. In the United States, having enough vaccinations later this year will make it possible to reopen schools, improve our working conditions, visit our family and friends, and hug them again. It’s true that we might never reach “herd immunity” and that immunity will be a fleeting thing, possibly requiring booster shots. But even if COVID stays with us, we can finally envision the time when our lives will return to something resembling “normal.”
These post-COVID times, or whatever we’ll call them, will come later for some, unfortunately. We need vaccines to be distributed more equitably. I’m glad that, in a short time, one sixth of Americans have already been vaccinated, but people of color, who have borne the brunt of the disease’s impacts, have had less access to the vaccines than white people. In contrast, only around one in 1,000 Iranians have been vaccinated so far, and some countries have yet to see a single dose enter their borders. Wealthy Western countries, including the US, have been hoarding vaccines, blocking waivers of intellectual property rights, and threatening to raise prices on vaccines. But despite these problems, I’m hoping that most people who want them will get their anti-COVID jab by Nowruz 2022.
A few days before Nowruz last week, we celebrated another Zoroastrian-era holiday known as Chahar Shanbeh Soori. On the night before the last Wednesday of the year, people come together and jump over small fires while singing an ancient verse, in the hopes of ridding their bodies of sickness and gleaning health and strength from the flames. In this Pandemic Year Two, let’s hold onto our health, reignite our fiery resilience and finally contain COVID-19.
More about me: I'm an astrophysicist turned writer and freelance journalist based in San Diego. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net and on Twitter @raminskibba. I'm also the former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express here are mine alone. You’re welcome to share this newsletter, and if you like what you’ve been writing or want to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thanks!