​If Katie Tanner wants to pay her bills, she has to work. And work means being around people – she’s a hairstylist in Reidsville.

The good thing is, she enjoys being with her clients and the conversations they have.

“Is there any cool stuff going on in Reidsville right now?” Katie asks her client, on this day, a lady named Melanie who has a hand in events in town.

“It’s been very tricky with the pandemic, lots of businesses having to be closed,” Melanie says. “It’s been very tricky because we can’t have the events we normally would.”

But Melanie has big news of her own, related to COVID.

“I infected my daughter and my dad and my dad is the one I was most worried about,” she tells Katie. “And it took him probably a good month after his 14-day quarantine was over before he had his energy level back. And my 15-year-old has not had a sense of taste since the third week in October. We keep hoping it’s going to come back. The last thing you want to think about is you’re the reason your daughter can’t taste any food.”

But that story looks like it has the chance for a happy ending. One change in Katie’s life, recently, doesn’t.

“Oh, that’s crazy. That is the biggest change,” Katie says when asked about it. “My grandpa was 82, he was a Navy vet and he was homebound, basically, since COVID started, him and my grandma.”

Katie’s grandfather passed away in January, after contracting COVID.

“It’s just really, truly depressing to be with my grandma and be around her,” she says, talking about her grandfather’s death and its aftermath. “It was just unfair, unfair. A lot of the deaths that I’ve experienced in my life have seemed unfair. It wasn’t like they did anything to cause it.”

See more about what happened in Tanner’s life concerning COVID in this Project 2021 report.