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Cooper: What we’ve lost and what we’ve found in our year of living dangerously

Staff File Photo / Our year of living with COVID-19 has given us a better opportunity to appreciate nature, such as these trees that were beginning to bloom along the Tennessee River waterfront in North Chattanooga on a previous late winter day.
Staff File Photo / Our year of living with COVID-19 has given us a better opportunity to appreciate nature, such as these trees that were beginning to bloom along the Tennessee River waterfront in North Chattanooga on a previous late winter day. Staff File Photo / Our year of living with COVID-19 has given us a better opportunity to appreciate nature, such as these trees that were beginning to bloom along the Tennessee River waterfront in North Chattanooga on a previous late winter day.

By Clint Cooper 4 min read

One year. Three hundred sixty-five days, though not a typical January to December trip around the sun.

It’s been one year since the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in Chattanooga.

It’s been a year that no one who lived through it will ever forget, and one no one wants to repeat.

As of Thursday, 41,303 Hamilton County residents – about one out of every nine – had been diagnosed with the virus. Of those, 464 died.

It had been more than a century since something so wicked this way had come. At its outset late last winter, we had no manual on what to do and no knowledge of who would be affected, for how long or how to treat it.