With apologies to Queen Elizabeth, 2020 has been our annus horribilis (a Latin phrase meaning “horrible year”).

In 1992, during a year-end address marking the 40th anniversary of her ascendancy to the throne of England, the queen famously said, “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.”

When she branded 1992 as a year that she would happily put into her rearview mirror, she no doubt had on her mind the fact that three royal marriages collapsed, a fire destroyed more than 100 rooms at Windsor Castle, and a toe-sucking scandal involving Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson shook the country and the monarchy.

Between Christmas and New Year’s, traditional slow news days, media organizations in the United States typically recap what went on during the year, but since this has been such an extraordinary year (for mostly all the wrong reasons), I wanted to break with tradition and focus exclusively on the million-pound gorilla in the room - COVID-19 - a few months early.

Thinking back to January and early February, the last time we might be tempted to say that life was “normal,” we went about our business of working, enjoying the simple pleasures of having a drink during happy hour, eating our favorite meal at our favorite restaurant, taking in a sporting event or a concert and preparing for the upcoming Lenten and Easter seasons. College students were settling in for their second semester of the school year.

I remember reading and hearing brief news stories about a new coronavirus having been confirmed in China in early January after officials there reported several residents of Wuhan had become ill. But the news media in the United States were focused on the impeachment trial of President Trump.

No one, including me, ever imagined that from this inauspicious beginning a worldwide pandemic equal in virulence to the deadly Spanish Flu outbreak of a century earlier would cause 2020 to make a U-turn into chaos and confusion.

On Jan. 21, the first U.S. citizen - a man from Washington State who had returned from Wuhan - was reported to have symptoms of the virus. Two days later, Chinese officials locked down Wuhan. Based on what we were hearing from our health and government officials, however, we brushed off this news as an aberration, something going on “over there,” not something to be concerned about.

A week later, the World Health Organization declared “a public health emergency of international concern” and named this new virus “COVID-19 (which stands for “COronaVIrus Disease, 2019). Although those in my inner circle of family and friends were not alarmed, my concern intensified because I was scheduled to go on vacation to Laughlin, Nevada, on Feb. 2 for a week.

When President Trump banned air travel from China at the end of January, I was persuaded to go through with my flight out west, especially since he had also said, “We think we have it very well under control.”

Of course, this turned out to be wishful thinking. The coronavirus quickly disrupted our daily lives by closing schools and businesses, packing hospitals, restricting travel and putting social gatherings, sporting events, concerts, festivals and travel plans on hold indefinitely.

On March 16, Gov. Tom Wolf shut down all nonessential businesses to try to get a grip on the growing number of coronavirus cases and deaths in Pennsylvania. After a gradual reopening, the state still has draconian restrictions on some businesses, especially restaurants and bars where 25% of capacity restrictions are in place.

From historically low unemployment in February, more than 10% of our citizens are out of work because of the virus. Our way of life has been transformed radically, possibly forever.

Most of us have seen the unsettling scenes of the bread lines of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and 1930s. We shook our heads and patted ourselves on the back, saying we would never see scenes like that again. That was ancient history.

Well, think again. We are seeing more and more lines of vehicles at food banks and other food-distribution sites as unemployed Pennsylvanians and those nationwide without jobs try to get the necessities of life.

These uncertain times will continue indefinitely until there is an effective vaccine. Even then, about half of the adults in our country said they will not take the vaccine over safety concerns, so how or when this will end is a big question mark.

Of course, 2020 will also be remembered for the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police and the sometimes violent Black Lives Matter protests that followed, the acquittal of the president after he was impeached, the result of the upcoming and contentious 2020 presidential election, hurricanes, wildfires and tornado deaths and destruction, yes, even murder hornets.

Going back to Queen Elizabeth’s speech in 1992: What she said about that year can be eerily applied to 2020: “I sometimes wonder how future generations will judge the events of this tumultuous year, but we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness and understanding.”

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com