These are some of the lives forever changed by COVID-19

Jessica Tapper with her children Matteo Agostini and Violet Agostini at their Oak Lawn home. Violet holds a photo of father Matthew “Turk” Agostini, who died of COVID-19 complications in November 2020, weeks before Matteo was born. (Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times)

Maybe you remember the first time you saw someone in a grocery store wearing a face mask and latex gloves and even a plastic face shield and thought: That’s a little extreme.

But it wasn’t all that uncommon after Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared on March 20, 2020: “To avoid the loss of potentially tens of thousands of lives, we must enact an immediate stay-at-home order for all in Illinois.”