The pandemic isn't fun to remember, but it revealed Knoxville's best

Beyond pieces of paper and pictures, the only souvenir I have from my four years at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville is a plastic bag containing an unused procedure I thought my future kids might find amusing.

In the bag, there's a plastic tube with a screw-on lid and a sticker sheet of barcodes. There's an instruction manual. My sophomore year, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this UT-branded plastic bag was delivered to my door every week or so.

The first step was to wake up, which was harder that year than it sounds. The second step was actually an omission – I was not to brush my teeth. The third step was to gather my untouched saliva and empty it into this plastic tube. Then I was to peel off a barcode that traced back to me.

Then I walked out of my dorm on the ninth floor of Laurel Hall and got on an elevator with other students holding their possibly contaminated phlegm. The final step was to hand over the tube to a staff member in the lobby, who scanned the barcode like a grocery store cashier and thanked me for my contribution.

I will have to explain to my kids what all this was for, but those of us who lived through the pandemic recognize saliva pool testing as one of many ways we tried to contain a virus whose most enduring side effect for many college students was anxiety.

When my school email was erased, so was the email I had flagged from Chancellor Donde Plowman on March 11, 2020, with the subject line “Urgent Message Regarding COVID-19 Response.” For years, I have had the sense that a living memory of those days has already slipped from our heads in the rapids of online discourse.

I compiled a brief oral history of the first year of the pandemic for the student newspaper, The Daily Beacon, and almost nobody read it. I couldn't blame them. Shortly after the pandemic became our reality, it also became the least interesting thing to talk about.

Perhaps that's why, four years after I first spit in those tubes, I did not ask a single question about the pandemic to one of the most important public figures in Knoxville during those years. Dr. Keith Gray was chief medical officer at UT Medical Center then, and he made himself astonishingly available to provide updates at livestreamed briefings and public meetings. He's now the medical center's president and CEO.

Read more:Dr. Keith Gray, raised far from halls of power, leads UT Medical Center to era of equity

In our two-hour interview (did I mention Gray's generosity with his time?), I asked him about the experiences as chief medical officer that prepared him for his current role, so the pandemic came up. He was at his daughter's softball tournament in Gulf Shores when everything shut down that Wednesday, March 11, 2020.

"I came back that Wednesday, and literally, we were writing policies for the county and city that Thursday morning that were going out to the public Thursday afternoon," Gray told me. "It was that kind of learning curve."

This retelling did not strike me in the moment, but I dwelled there later as I went back through our interview. Most people's "where I was" stories about the pandemic are less than compelling. I was in a dorm room when the email came through. Gray was at a softball tournament.

Unlike personal accounts of Sept. 11, these stories don't derive their power from proximity to the disaster, because the pandemic was everywhere. It was in the duct work of my dorm.

Proximity in the pandemic meant going where the people were, wherever they were. Being a hero in the pandemic meant moving toward the crowds of the sick and skeptical, even as the official guidance was to stay away.

Gray was named a 2021 Knox.biz Health Care Hero, specifically for bringing calm, compassionate and science-based messaging to the public when it was needed most. He did much of this work in partnership with Cynthia Finch, who held weekly meetings with Black churches to help them fight the virus through the Faith Leaders Church Initiative.

This is another thing I'd like to remember about the pandemic: that there were people in Knoxville who were tired and anxious, but got up each morning prepared to save lives with their message.

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The story of the pandemic has already become one of scientists and doctors losing the public's trust. That story is not a local one. It's another narrative on the garbage heap of controversies that neglect the local and fixate on the federal.

Dr. Gray's service to our community, which continues through organizations like Emerald Youth Foundation and United Way of Greater Knoxville, doesn't fit into a narrative of lost trust. In fact, it's a story of a medical professional gaining the trust of his community when it was hardest to do so.

The pandemic is still not a fun or particularly interesting story to tell. I see books about it at bookstores and wonder if anyone is buying them. But if we ever say "never forget" about the pandemic, we better be talking about people like Dr. Gray, who led us through those bleak years and are still shepherding us today.

Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Phone 423-637-0878. Email [email protected].

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