Two years ago today, we awoke in a reality unlike anything we could’ve imagined at dawn a day earlier.

It was March 11, 2020, the morning after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, flanked by doctors and emergency personnel, stepped in front of TV cameras to announce officials had detected the first cases of COVID-19 in our state. It also was the day the World Health Organization declared the spread of COVID-19 had become a pandemic.

From that day forward, our lives changed rapidly, and in ways most of us never imagined we would see in our lifetime. Within weeks, the governor issued a stay-at-home order, schools shuttered, businesses scrambled to adapt to remote work, and health officials scrambled to prepare for an anticipated influx of infections.

Terms like supply chain, social distancing, masking and positivity rate became daily fixtures in our vernacular.

Epidemiologists explained how the virus would undulate in waves of mutations that likely would last years, at least until we reach something at resembles herd immunity either through widespread infection or rapid proliferation of vaccines. They also predicted the virus would never entirely subside, but we would learn to mitigate it, to live with it.

Since then, many of their predictions have come to fruition.

We’ve witnessed four waves of illness, hospitalizations and deaths wash over our region, state and nation. And between each one we’ve experienced short, cautious tastes of a post-pandemic world. A world where the virus persists, but doesn’t suppress normal routines. A world where we might not spend quite so much time calculating exposure risk on the drive to the grocery store.

The last wave, the one we now are inching down the backside of, was the worst yet.

During the span from September to March, we watched a wave driven by the Delta variant give way to a much larger wave of the Omicron variant. During that period, hospitalizations in northern Michigan spiked far beyond any other wave, and stayed high for months. Deaths marched along in lockstep – more than one-third of all COVID-19 deaths in northern Michigan since the beginning of the pandemic were recorded between Dec. 1 and this week.

All that is to say the past two years have been a long haul for us all.

Still, as the door opens on a third year of life in a pandemic, and positivity rates continue a steep decline, we find plenty to be both thankful and hopeful for.

No, COVID-19 didn’t vanish, and it likely won’t. But today we have plenty of reason to look forward with cautious optimism.

We have plenty of reason to hope for a new normal ahead.