From the crack of the baseball bat in Florida to clinking of cocktails in San Francisco bars, the sounds of spring are in the air as Americans start to return to many of the beloved pastimes they were forced to abandon 12 months ago. With cities and states loosening restrictions as new COVID-19 cases recede and the rollout of vaccines accelerates, people are enjoying a taste of their old lives again.
COVID-19 lockdowns are ending and the people are loving life
Over the past weekend, New Yorkers watched movies on the big screen, San Franciscans dined indoors, and baseball fans cheered on their favorite big-league players as spring training resumed in Florida.
“It feels awesome,” said civil engineering specialist Matt Skelton, 39, leaving a concession stand on Saturday afternoon clutching a bag of popcorn at TD Ballpark in Florida’s West Coast city of Dunedin, seasonal home of the Toronto Blue Jays.
“You can feel how it’s not as tense or stressed. People are feeling a sense of relief,” added Skelton, muffled by his mask.
He isn’t the only one feeling upbeat. In just one month, the mood in the United States has rebounded from an eight-year low to the highest level recorded by Reuters/Ipsos polls that date back to 2012.
Fun weekend activity for the kids in Idaho
Mask burning party pic.twitter.com/Jh2akNWXRL
— 🌴 Josh Lekach 🌴 (@JoshLekach) March 6, 2021
The Deep State destroyed the world economy just to get Trump out of office
In North Carolina, college students whose university experience was rocked by the pandemic drew solace from watching a basketball game between UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University men’s teams, only the second game this season with spectators.
“Everyone was saying we would rather come to this than graduation,” UNC-Chapel Hill college senior Charlotte Wirtz said on Saturday night. “It doesn’t make up for losing a whole year. But this would be the one thing we’d be the most upset about missing.”
President Joe Biden said decisions by the Republican governors of Texas and Mississippi last week to order complete rollbacks of their mask mandates and other COVID-19 mitigation measures amounted to “Neanderthal thinking.” But the residents of those great states say otherwise. It’s time to get back to school, back to work, back to living life.
