It’s not that Abigail Rogado hadn’t traveled at all since March 2020. But when the founder and chief executive officer of branding consultancy ArtTank had hit the road, she’d done it with trepidation.
"I lost my dad to COVID in the pandemic’s early days,” she says. "It made me more heightened about my precautions. I was really living the hermit life. I didn’t even go outside to take walks for months.”
Even after cases had declined substantially in the fall of 2021, Rogado still wore a mask outdoors in New York City, her hometown. Then omicron happened and everything changed. To this day she has no idea how she came down with COVID-19; she’d canceled all her holiday plans and barely even gone to the grocery store. But now she’s planning trips to Paris, Iceland and Costa Rica within the next 90 days.