More Than Likes is a series about social media personalities who are trying to do positive things for their communities.The video begins with an instructor and a barbell, like so many others on Instagram. But then, as Casey Johnston, the instructor, dead-lifts the barbell — 45 pounds, plus 160 more pounds’ worth of weights — to her waist, an annotation appears in the corner: “Things we have to pick up regularly that weigh 25+ lbs.” It then lists examples like suitcases, coolers, furniture and so forth.Ms. Johnston, 36, has built an online community around both championing the functional benefits of strength training and demystifying a form of exercise that can be intimidating to those on the outside. For Ms. Johnston, lifting is about taking ownership of one’s body.She does not promise the secret to washboard abs or a slimmer waist, as many fitness influencers do. Ms. Johnston, instead, provides her 34,000-plus Instagram followers and nearly 25,000 subscribers to her She’s a Beast newsletter with the tools to build a body that can more seamlessly move through everyday life. And she writes sharp, incisive takes on modern discourse surrounding fitness, eating and other related subjects.Before she started lifting, Ms. Johnston, here doing a dead lift, focused on running and limiting calories — a pursuit laced with negativity.Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times“It’s often guilt, guilt, guilt. You’re never doing enough,” Ms. Johnston said of the mainstream fitness climate. For her, gym sessions are “not about experiencing the most pain you can tolerate. They’re about building a basic skill that is accessible to everybody.”In Ms. Johnston’s experience, that difference, in turn, can lead to better emotional and mental health. “This becomes a gratifying feedback loop, where it’s like, oh, ‘I can get stronger, and my body doesn’t just exist to either be a meat sack that holds my brain in, or to look attractive to other people’,” she said.Ms. Johnston, who was an editor at Wirecutter, a New York Times Company that reviews products, from 2014 to 2018, began writing her Ask a Swole Woman column for the site Hairpin in 2016 (“swole” means very muscular). She found that her writing resonated with readers hungry for more accessible fitness writing, and after the site shut down in early 2018, her column bounced around before becoming part of the paid version of her newsletter. She has also written an e-book, “LIFTOFF: Couch to Barbell,” which is marketed as a “weight lifting guide for the rest of us” (it has sold more than 10,000 copies), and she has a channel on the social app Discord, where she directly connects with readers.Before she started lifting, Ms. Johnston focused on running and limiting calories as a way to pursue the kind of body that had been glorified when she was growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That pursuit was laced with negativity.After committing to lifting, corralling a large bag of cat litter is no longer a strenuous task for Ms. Johnston.Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times“I think people who are about my age grew up in an extremely difficult time in terms of the way the media acted toward women and ridiculed them for the tiniest flaws,” Ms. Johnston said. “There was such entitlement in the media to police how women looked, or the way they conducted themselves in public. Britney Spears is probably our most canonical example of this, where there were constant headlines about if her weight fluctuated.”In 2013, Ms. Johnston stumbled upon a Reddit post featuring a female bodybuilder that piqued her interest. She was ready for a change: She wasn’t eating much, and her hands and feet were often cold. Through lifting, she realized, she could more smartly balance her food intake and exercise. But she’s not here to judge other approaches.“I’m radically accepting of whatever it is that people want to do. I’m not here to argue with them about what they think works,” Ms. Johnston said of those who prefer other forms of exercise to weight lifting. “My only position is that I think strength training gets a bad rap.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Casey Johnston (@swolewoman) The first time she went to the gym — an “intimidating place,” she said — she pushed aside her feelings of insecurity and performed three exercises: squats, benches and rows, three sets each of five “reps,” or repetitions.Then, she said, she made a beeline for the bodega. “I became so hungry,” Ms. Johnston said. “My body is, like, demanding its feast after going to battle.”Ms. Johnston soon began structuring meals around her lifting, eating more protein and carbohydrates. She delighted in her newfound strength. Cooling off after a workout in her home gym. Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times“She’s constantly thinking about her body as this system,” Seamus McKiernan, her partner, said. “What’s going into it? And what you can make it do? And how it can make you feel better and do more?”Her platforms give “people a place where they know they are with other people who are on the same page that they are, where they’re oriented toward more functionality and a sustainable practice,” Ms. Johnston said.Her friend Choire Sicha, an editor-at-large at New York magazine and the former editor of the Styles section at The New York Times, bought Ms. Johnston’s e-book in 2021. After sitting at his desk for long hours during the pandemic, he realized his body was on the verge of “deteriorating” and challenged himself to do something that made him “profoundly uncomfortable,” as Mr. Sicha put it. He became a volunteer firefighter but realized that he needed to build strength.He turned to Ms. Johnston’s guide to lifting and found that the philosophy that undergirded her work resonated.“She knows that we’re not all going to be champion weight lifters, and she knows that we’re not all going to look pretty when we do it,” Mr. Sicha said. “It’s just very anti-Instagram-aesthetic. It’s very pro-human.”

This is part of the I Want to Thank You series. We asked readers to tell us about who helped get them through the pandemic; these are a selection of their stories. Other articles focused on family and friends and health care workers.Who helped you make it through the pandemic? When we asked our readers, they mentioned friends, new and old, and family, and the health care workers who cared for them and their loved ones. But some never even met the person who helped them.Here are the stories of four of those people: one who found comfort in LeVar Burton’s reading podcast, one who discovered the Korean supergroup BTS, one who identified with Lily Tomlin’s character in “Grace and Frankie,” and one who never missed a local musician’s daily web performance.Thank You for Your PodcastIn November 2020, Mary Gaughan, her husband and their two daughters left their 900-square-foot apartment in Brookline, Mass., for a house in East Brewster, on Cape Cod. The popular summer vacation town was empty — ideal for avoiding Covid. But it was also lonely and cold, and did little to provide Ms. Gaughan hope.Then she learned about “LeVar Burton Reads,” a podcast in which Mr. Burton, the “Reading Rainbow” host and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” actor, recites short stories. Ms. Gaughan’s daily walks through the woods transformed into literary adventures.“It’s like meeting a friend for the first time,” Mr. Burton said about seeing Ms. Gaughan in person.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times“Even though we had gotten out of the city, it wasn’t clear how we were going to get back. How was our life going to continue?” Ms. Gaughan, 57, said. “Was there any light at the end of the tunnel? That’s where this found me.”On one walk, Ms. Gaughan listened to Mr. Burton read Nnedi Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention,” set in a future version of Nigeria. It was snowing on Cape Cod, but Ms. Gaughan found herself transported. “It felt like being in a bubble,” she said. (At the start of every show, Mr. Burton encourages listeners to take a deep breath, inspiring Ms. Gaughan to implement a breathing practice into her life.)Though Ms. Gaughan and her family returned to their Brookline apartment last February, Mr. Burton continued to be a calming presence for her. She finally finished the podcast’s 170-episode catalog, which she listened to on the Stitcher app, this spring, but not before recommending it to about 10 friends.“I just want him to know that this had a profound impact on my life during the worst part of the pandemic for us,” Ms. Gaughan said. “At the end of each one, he’ll sort of give you just a few moments of, like, why did he pick this, what does it mean to him, how did he connect with it, which I really liked because, again, I was feeling very isolated, and it’s not just reading a story to you, but, like, sharing things about his life.”After Ms. Gaughan submitted her note, The New York Times flew her out to California to meet Mr. Burton in person for the first time. He often meets fans who, like Ms. Gaughan, have followed him since his “Reading Rainbow” days, he later said. But Ms. Gaughan’s relationship with the podcast was particularly moving, he said. He felt an immediate kinship with her.“It’s like meeting a friend for the first time,” Mr. Burton said. “We have all this history in common, when we first encounter each other. I could tell if we lived closer, we’d, you know, we’d see each other.”Joanne Orrico with a ticket stub from a BTS concert, along with portraits of the K-pop supergroup, at her home in Las Vegas. Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThank You for ‘Butter’The antidote to Joanne Orrico’s pandemic malaise appeared last summer in a YouTube thumbnail. Mrs. Orrico started the video and almost immediately felt a shift. “Butter,” the relentlessly catchy hit by the K-pop group and worldwide sensation BTS, filled her headphones.“After I listened to it, I listened to it again,” Mrs. Orrico, 56, said. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.’”The pressure to put on a happy face amid so much suffering and political turmoil had left Mrs. Orrico, a school librarian from Las Vegas, feeling anxious and depressed. But as she learned more about the seven members of BTS — Jung Kook, V, Jimin, SUGA, j-hope, Jin and RM — with their sunny dispositions and positive lyrics, she rediscovered her pep. For Mrs. Orrico, BTS “spoke” to her during a trying time.“It’s important to spread kindness and acceptance and love,” Mrs. Orrico said. Mrs. Orrico, who is of Japanese and Chinese descent, said her immigrant mother had always stressed the importance of behaving like an “American.” Mrs. Orrico never understood the power of representation in the media, but that changed when she learned the Korean group had a global fan base. At a time of rising anti-Asian violence, Mrs. Orrico took pride in knowing people around the world enjoyed BTS songs, most of which are in Korean. Her awakening inspired her to start learning the language and to begin cooking Korean food.Mrs. Orrico, who is of Japanese and Chinese descent, took pride in knowing people around the world enjoyed BTS songs, most of which are in Korean. Her love for the band inspired her to start learning the language and to begin cooking Korean food.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesBTS fans call themselves the Army (Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth); on April 15, some of them packed Allegiant Stadium, in Paradise, Nev. At the concert, Mrs. Orrico looked out at the sea of Army members, many dressed in purple — BTS’s signature color — and the country’s divisions seemed to melt away.“Seeing people of all ages, seeing male, female, Black people, Asian people, Mexican. Grandpas, grandmothers, little kids, and everybody. There was nothing like hearing 40,000 people all singing along to the songs,” she said. “For that brief time, nothing else existed.”Mrs. Orrico’s favorite moment came when the group performed “Life Goes On,” a somber pandemic-themed song that moved Mrs. Orrico to tears the first time she heard it. At the concert, Mrs. Orrico, who attended with a friend she reconnected with after 30 years over their shared BTS fandom, said the group sang the song in a more upbeat tone.“It was purely joyful and happy, like they were just so happy to be there,” she said. “We felt that too.”The actress, writer and producer Lily Tomlin at the RBC House in Toronto, where she was attending the city’s international film festival. It was her performance on the Netflix show “Grace and Frankie” that inspired Hilary Almeida during the early months of the pandemic. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThank You for Being FrankieHilary Almeida placed her laptop on her husband’s side of the bed and fell asleep to the Netflix hit “Grace and Frankie.”It was April 2020, and Mrs. Almeida believed she had Covid — she had lost her sense and smell and was experiencing fatigue, headache and a low fever but did not take a test because of low national supply — and didn’t want to infect her husband, a physician.For a couple of months at their home in Teaneck, N.J., as her husband slept in the guest room, Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) were Mrs. Almeida’s muses. She felt a particular kinship with Frankie, the eccentric artist with a deep well of compassion. Mrs. Almeida, 65, was working as a middle school E.S.L. teacher, and she played the show on loop after her workday as her symptoms raged for a couple of months.“This vulnerable character, I could relate to all these things,” Mrs. Almeida said. “She was feisty. I consider myself such a strong person but I felt so challenged at the time. I was physically weak and I had a headache. Frankie also had moments where she was vulnerable and she didn’t feel well, but she was full of emotion.”Like so many others, Mrs. Almeida first discovered Ms. Tomlin on the TV show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” which ran from 1968 to 1973, but her fandom took on another level with “Grace and Frankie,” which, before the pandemic, she would watch with her mother after her mother’s chemotherapy appointments. The practice took on even more importance after her mother died and the pandemic hit.Grace and Frankie are an odd couple, staggering into friendship after their husbands reveal they are in love. In Frankie, Mrs. Almeida found a kindred spirit.“I love her,” Mrs. Almeida said, “the way Grace learned to love her.”The musician Semisi Ma’u at his home in Vista, Calif. Janell Cannon developed a routine that revolved around his rendition of the song “Lata Lullaby.”John Francis Peters for The New York TimesThank You for Your LullabyDuring the pandemic, at her San Diego area home, Janell Cannon and her cat, Taliesin, developed a routine every night around 9.Ms. Cannon would pour herself a glass of wine. Taliesin would curl up on his bed. And together they would listen to Semisi Ma’u’s rendition of “Lata Lullaby.”Mr. Ma’u, a musician with gray Albert Einstein hair based in the San Diego area, played the song, written to honor his mother, nightly on Facebook Live with various family members from March 2020 to March 2021. The performances, with guitars and a piano, would last for about five to 10 minutes, and Ms. Canon was among the locals who tuned in.“I never got tired of it,” Ms. Cannon, 64, said. “The familiarity helped to deal with the uncertainty.”Though Mr. Ma’u and his family played the same song every night, one musician was always allotted time for a solo, whether on guitar or the drums or something else. Ms. Cannon particularly enjoyed when Mr. Ma’u played the fangufangu (nose flute), popular in his native Tonga.Ms. Cannon, author of the popular 1993 children’s book “Stellaluna,” was in isolation, but she was hardly alone.“Everybody loves Semisi,” she said.

This article is part of the I Want to Thank You series. We asked readers to tell us about who helped get them through the pandemic; this is a selection of their stories about health care workers. We’ve published an article about family and friends, and a forthcoming article will focus on inspirational figures.Health care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic offered more than just medical services. They gave Americans emotional support, connection and innovative solutions.Here are the stories of a disabled woman, her father and her caretakers; a lawyer and her late mother’s physician; a woman with paraplegia and her home health aide; and a contact tracer.Thank You for Caring for My ‘Profoundly Disabled’ DaughterIn 2001, Doug Jacoby was reading to his 5-year-old daughter, Devon, in their Easton, Conn., home when the book fell on the floor. She climbed off his lap and scooped it up — an innocuous moment for most families, but for the Jacobys it was groundbreaking.With that simple action, Devon, who has brain damage and is nonverbal, defied the doctors who had told her parents she would always be slow to respond to stimuli. (She does not have an official diagnosis but is “profoundly disabled,” her father said.)In 2020, Ms. Jacoby was receiving assistance at the Saint Catherine Center for Special Needs in Fairfield, Conn., and had been since she turned 21. But when the pandemic shut down the center, her progress was threatened: Constant engagement is crucial to Ms. Jacoby’s development, Mr. Jacoby said.“You fear that lacking the stimulus, lacking seeing the faces, lacking the experience, she will backslide and she will lose awareness,” Mr. Jacoby, 72, said.Then, in April 2020, the center began to offer virtual programming over Zoom, and for two to three hours per day Ms. Jacoby was engaged and happy. (Ms. Jacoby’s parents are divorced, and she splits time living with each of them.) During music therapy sessions, she would bop her head to the beat. When the center reopened in July 2020, Mr. Jacoby knew he was sending Ms. Jacoby, now 26, back to people who genuinely cared for her.“You don’t work with people like my daughter and do it well because it’s a job. You do it because it’s a calling,” Mr. Jacoby said. “I have too much gratitude to have the ability to express it.”The center’s virtual sessions also included weather updates and story time. During music therapy, Mr. Jacoby, who works from home as a freelance writer, would hold a wooden spoon in Ms. Jacoby’s hand and help her bang it against a pot.“It takes time to really get to know her, but when you do you can sense when she’s happy,” Mr. Jacoby said. “Most of the time with the music, most of the time during story time, you can tell that she was engaged.”Dr. Vanessa Tiongson, a neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, earned the trust of one of her patients, Aura Shirley Sarmiento.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesThank You for Being More Than Just a Doctor to My Ill MotherMost of the calls Jackie Marzan made to her mother’s doctors to inform them of her death from Covid-19 in November 2020 followed a familiar script: The doctors expressed shock, offered their condolences and said goodbye.And then Ms. Marzan, sitting in her mother’s apartment in Queens, called Dr. Vanessa Tiongson, her mother’s neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital. They spoke for more than two hours.Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicEducational Declines: Test results show the pandemic’s effect on U.S. students: The math and reading scores of 9-year-olds dropped steeply, erasing two decades of progress.Heavy Toll: The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021. The decline, largely driven by the pandemic, was particularly pronounced among Indigenous communities.Boosters: An influential panel of expert advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended updated coronavirus booster shots to the vast majority of Americans, clearing the way for health workers to begin giving people the redesigned shots within days.Paxlovid Study: The Covid-19 medication Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations and deaths in older patients, but made no difference for patients under 65, new research from Israel found.“She was asking me, ‘How do you feel?’ And then she was sharing with me how she felt,” Ms. Marzan, 51, said. “She said, ‘Oh, your mom — I’m going to miss her. She was my favorite.’”Ms. Marzan’s mother, Aura Shirley Sarmiento, typically preferred that her doctors spoke Spanish; Dr. Tiongson did not, but earned Ms. Sarmiento’s trust nonetheless. Not long before her death, Ms. Sarmiento called Ms. Marzan crying tears of joy: Dr. Tiongson’s positive attitude had given her hope.Dr. Tiongson’s empathy stuck with Ms. Marzan as the pandemic decimated her family: Over the next year Ms. Marzan would lose her grandmother and two aunts to Covid. In April, her father-in-law also died from the virus.“Imagine the holidays, and you go home for the holidays and you see the kitchen full of women cooking,” Ms. Marzan said. “In my case, those are all the women cooking. They’re all gone.”As the months wore on, she found fewer conversation partners willing to discuss Covid and her family.“People don’t want to hear about Covid,” she said. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad anymore.’ It’s like, yeah, but Covid, it permeated our lives.”Dr. Tiongson didn’t forget. In January, Ms. Marzan received a holiday card from Dr. Tiongson, with a photo of the doctor’s children and a note expressing her love for Ms. Sarmiento. “I thought, Who does this?” Ms. Marzan said.Although she considers herself a minimalist, she said, she’ll always have room in her home for that card.Thank You for Being My Home Aide and Having CompassionAnnie Verchick, a woman with paraplegia and a traumatic brain injury living in rural Laporte, Colo., has worked with a revolving door of home aides. But over the past couple of years, as the pandemic compounded Ms. Verchick’s isolation, her relationship with Karen Coty, a home aide, blossomed into friendship.In the spring of 2021, when Ms. Verchick was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, Ms. Coty accompanied Ms. Verchick to her appointments and brought her ginger ale and ice packs.“Again and again and again, she just showed up,” Ms. Verchick, 57, said.Ms. Coty first started working with Ms. Verchick in 2016, and soon they were playfully arguing about werewolf romance novels and dissecting “M*A*S*H,” the hit TV show that ran from 1972 to 1983.“It was OK to have things be silly and not be tragic all the time,” Ms. Verchick said. “Karen is really disinterested in treating people as though they’re special and precious, which makes her a big win for me. You don’t get to be special. You’re a whole human being — who’s in a chair. That’s a really rare attitude.”Ms. Coty stopped working with Ms. Verchick in November 2018 so she could attend school, before returning in the summer of 2019. When Ms. Verchick, who has neurogenic bowel dysfunction, had what she called an “incontinent disaster” and the aides scheduled to work that day couldn’t show up, she called Ms. Coty, who was there 10 minutes later. Ms. Coty cleaned everything up and slept over the next two nights.Ms. Coty resumed her post with Ms. Verchick and stayed through the pandemic. She left in July of this year to pursue other opportunities, but not before training Ms. Verchick’s new aides.“I don’t know that she realizes on any level how meaningful it is,” Ms. Verchick said of Ms. Coty’s friendship.Jennifer Guy Cook at her home in Brighton, N.Y.Lauren Petracca for The New York TimesThank You for Letting Me Help You as a Contact TracerJennifer Guy Cook’s home was eerily quiet. So she filled it with the voices of strangers.Ms. Cook, 68, had spent the past three-plus decades running a day care out of her home in Brighton, N.Y. When she shut down the business because of the pandemic, she landed a position with New York State’s Covid contact tracing initiative. She had found a purpose: helping people through a tough time in their lives.For 20 hours per week, Ms. Cook would call people who had been in close contact with someone who had tested positive for Covid. Ms. Cook held the job only from December 2020 to June 2021, but she’s grateful for the connections she made.“I wanted to be a part of helping,” Ms. Cook said. “I could certainly make phone calls.”Amid the gray Brighton winter, Ms. Cook relished the human connection. (She would tease fathers who had forgotten their children’s birthdays, joking that mothers normally had a less difficult time remembering them.) Her job was, on the surface, informational: She was to provide facts about the virus and potential warning signs. But it turned into much more.“Some of the people that I talked to were just in that situation of being scared, and being worried, and being worried for their children, or being worried for their parents,” Ms. Cook said.That’s where Ms. Cook would interject with a light joke or words of encouragement. “It’s injecting your own humanity in the conversation,” she said. “And just by doing that, it changes everything.”Ms. Cook holding the headset she used as a contact tracer.Lauren Petracca for The New York Times

This article is part of the I Want to Thank You series. We asked readers to tell us about who helped get them through the pandemic; these are a selection of their stories about their families and friends. Future articles will focus on health care workers and inspirational figures.Many Americans hunkered down with family members when the pandemic hit. Others relied on friends for support, emotional and otherwise. As the country moves on, some are emerging with deeper relationships and renewed appreciation for the loved ones who helped them get through an uncertain time.Among the stories: a married couple facing cancer; a new widow and her kayaking support group; a fearful actress and her childhood friend; a stroke survivor and her daughter; a septuagenarian and her 43-year-old travel buddy; and two sisters, one of them pregnant.From left, Martha Fagg, Susanne Skyrm, Elizabeth Smith and Jo Pasqualucci on Ms. Smith’s porch in Vermillion, S.D. (The group also includes Lana Svien, not pictured.) Arin Yoon for The New York TimesThank You for Helping Me Deal With DeathOn the morning of June 25, 2020, something compelled Elizabeth Smith awake at 5:30. She walked to the hospice bed of her husband, Larry, and held his hand. His breathing had become uneven. Then it slowed.“And then it became erratic,” Ms. Smith, 72, said, her voice softening. “And then he squeezed my hand really, really hard. He took one last breath, and he died.”Mr. Smith’s death, at 71, left her heartbroken and even more lonely during the early days of the pandemic. The couple had moved from Connecticut, where Mr. Smith had been a police captain, to Vermillion, S.D., in 1999. He was forced to retire after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — he no longer qualified to carry a gun — and so Ms. Smith accepted a tenured professorship in the University of South Dakota’s political science department. Mr. Smith opened a bakery that, according to Oprah.com, baked “the best bread in the world.”The day after his death, Ms. Smith brought her husband’s ashes to a friend’s front lawn for a socially distanced gathering of friends, namely four women — Lana Svien, Jo Pasqualucci, Susanne Skyrm and Martha Fagg. As the summer wore on, the quintet — all single, retired and around the same age — often hung out on Ms. Smith’s lawn to share laughs and meals. When temperatures chilled they moved the lawn chairs to Ms. Smith’s open garage, which they outfitted with space heaters and dubbed “Cafe Covid.” Ms. Smith and her friends also share a love of the outdoors. She spent much of her first weeks without her husband kayaking the Missouri River, often with at least one of the self-described “Usual Suspects.”“I could send out a message in the morning, saying ‘Anyone want to kayak today?’ and get some responses,” she said.On Ms. Smith’s first Thanksgiving after her husband’s death, they gathered on her front porch for a potluck meal. And this past July a group of them headed to Oakwood Lakes State Park — some in Ms. Smith’s camping van, nicknamed “Van-essa” — for what was supposed to be a couple days of kayaking.Instead the trip got cut short, thanks to a pileup of bad luck. Ms. Smith said the group couldn’t stop laughing about the comedy of errors.“Having each other has been really a gift,” she said.Mahira Kakkar, left, and Shubhani Sarkar at Albert’s Garden, a community garden space in New York.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesThank You for Helping Me Get OutsideOn a summer afternoon in 2020, sitting on a bench in Central Park, Mahira Kakkar took off her mask and, for the first time in months, took a breath of fresh air.Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicEducational Declines: Test results show the pandemic’s effect on U.S. students: The math and reading scores of 9-year-olds dropped steeply, erasing two decades of progress.Heavy Toll: The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021. The decline, largely driven by the pandemic, was particularly pronounced among Indigenous communities.Boosters: An influential panel of expert advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended updated coronavirus booster shots to the vast majority of Americans, clearing the way for health workers to begin giving people the redesigned shots within days.Paxlovid Study: The Covid-19 medication Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations and deaths in older patients, but made no difference for patients under 65, new research from Israel found.Ms. Kakkar, an actress who has worked on TV and in film, had hardly left her apartment since that March, and she probably wouldn’t have gone to Central Park had it not been for Shubhani Sarkar.The two women had been friends while growing up in Kolkata, India. And they reconnected when they both moved to New York in the early 2000s, Ms. Kakkar to continue her education and Ms. Sarkar to begin her career as a graphic designer. But as the pandemic wore on and Ms. Kakkar felt burned out, she stopped answering Ms. Sarkar’s messages. “We were sad and lonely,” Ms. Kakkar said of herself and her husband. “But we were lucky to be sad and lonely. One of my other friends is an E.R. doctor, and sometimes she would just share her feelings. And it was horrible.”Eventually Ms. Kakkar responded to Ms. Sarkar, who’d texted that she missed her friend. “I miss you too,” Ms. Kakkar wrote back.Ms. Sarkar sent Ms. Kakkar pictures of the signs at subway stops, urging riders to maintain six feet of distance, and eventually persuaded her to join on a walk. Ms. Kakkar prayed during her entire ride.Taking off her mask in Central Park “felt like such a huge deal,” Mr. Kakkar said, and over several more walks, her friendship with Ms. Sarkar deepened. Ms. Kakkar also joined Ms. Sarkar’s cooking classes, where she would guide the group through Indian recipes via Zoom.“It was very nice to have someone else with a common background share similar anecdotes and stories, as people kind of listened in and cooked along,” Ms. Sarkar said of her friend.Ms. Kakkar said that Ms. Sarkar was surprised upon learning how much her outreach had helped Ms. Kakkar through the pandemic: “She was like, ‘I just missed you.’”“She knew better what I needed than I did,” Jon Ellis said of his wife, Rita, who he credits for helping him get through cancer.Cig Harvey for The New York TimesThe couple at Lermond Pond with their dog, Ginger.Cig Harvey for The New York TimesThank You for Getting Me Through CancerJon Ellis had never been afraid to die. And he still wasn’t. But it was becoming more difficult to live through the pain.Pancreatic cancer, with which he was diagnosed not long after the pandemic hit, and chemotherapy rendered him a stranger in his own body. As a pilot for 50 years, Mr. Ellis knew how tenuous life really is. But at least in the sky he was free. Down in his 1,500-square-foot home in Maine, Mr. Ellis, 75, could hardly pull himself off the couch.Mr. Ellis probably wouldn’t have survived, he said, if not for his wife.Rita Ellis would drive him to chemotherapy appointments, then shepherd him home and make sure he drank his smoothies. “She knew better what I needed than I did,” he said.Mrs. Ellis, 72, refused to complain, even when, on top of everything else, the Ellises’ daughter became ill and was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.The Ellises had moved to Maine from Memphis about five years earlier, in part to be closer to their children living in the Northeast. Now, forced to spend time with each other more than ever, the couple spoke about what Mrs. Ellis’s future might look like in practical terms: She would have to move, they agreed, to a less rural part of town, if Mr. Ellis were to die.“I was ready to hear that I wasn’t going to make it for another year,” Mr. Ellis said. “We had some really good heart-to-heart talks about our longevity on this planet. In our case, at least, it made us very much closer. I’m grateful for that.”Mrs. Ellis didn’t need to move. Mr. Ellis’s final chemotherapy treatment was in March 2021, and his cancer remains undetectable.Mr. Ellis sometimes loses his train of thought when speaking — “chemo brain,” he calls it — but in discussing his wife, Mr. Ellis’s feelings are clear.“I’ve fallen in love with her all over again,” he said.Cheryl Pearlman and her daughter, Deanna Otero, at Ms. Pearlman’s home in Brooklyn, N.Y. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThank You for Helping My RecoveryIt was no coincidence, Cheryl Pearlman believes, that the first time she walked without the assistance of a walker since suffering a stroke during the pandemic was in the presence of her daughter, Deanna Otero.Last autumn, Ms. Pearlman was in her home with Ms. Otero and without thinking walked to the dining room table.Ms. Otero had “really, I think, believed I would recover. I wasn’t always so sure,” Ms. Pearlman, 74, said. “It was so moving that she was there to witness it — and notice it — when I didn’t.”Earlier in the year, Ms. Pearlman started taking medication for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition which makes heart muscles thicken, causing the heart to work harder. She soon started experiencing shortness of breath and underwent surgery. When Ms. Pearlman woke up, she learned that she had suffered a stroke and was paralyzed from the shoulder down on the left side of her body.During Ms. Pearlman’s two weeks in rehab, Ms. Otero, 36, redesigned her mother’s home to make it easier to navigate. She also had the bathroom painted yellow and the dining room white.“She thought my house was too dark,” Ms. Pearlman said.Ms. Pearlman, who works as a psychotherapist, is almost back to her old self, she said. “I made it very clear to her that 90 percent of my recovery was because of her,” Ms. Pearlman said of her daughter.Drew Johnson and Victoria Bernuth began taking socially distanced walks together in Eugene, Ore., during the pandemic.Joseph Haeberle for The New York TimesThank You for Your FriendshipVictoria Bernuth didn’t have to worry about groceries during the worst months of the pandemic.Ms. Bernuth, 74, never left her Pleasant Hill, Ore., farm, but she found a lifeline in Drew Johnson, 43, whom she had met at a local meeting for humanists before Covid hit. Mr. Johnson, a former youth pastor, would drop off her groceries, then the two would take long walks along the country roads near Ms. Bernuth’s farm.As they walked and talked 15 feet apart, bonding in part over their shared atheism, Ms. Bernuth’s loneliness lifted.“We’re not romantic,” Ms. Bernuth said. “But we just have a deep affection for each other and caring for each other.”Ms. Bernuth and Mr. Johnson had taken several road trips before the pandemic, and after Ms. Bernuth got her first Covid vaccine in March 2021 he floated an idea: “C’mon, let’s go to the beach.”Ms. Bernuth teared up on the car ride to Beverly Beach, about two hours away; it was her first time being physically close to a person in almost a year. The trip was calming; they worked on crossword puzzles, looked out on the ocean and went on long walks.“He is the joy and light of my life,” Ms. Bernuth said.Rebecca Spigelman, right, helped her sister, Sarah Richter, when she was pregnant during the pandemic.Tess Ayano for The New York TimesThank You for Helping Me Through My PregnancyRebecca Spigelman did not hug her sister, Sarah Richter, for six months during the first wave of the pandemic. Ms. Richter was pregnant and anxious about how contracting Covid could impact her pregnancy.But nearly every day Ms. Spigelman walked 33 street blocks and three avenues — public transportation didn’t feel safe at the time — to Ms. Richter’s apartment to help with household chores: She washed produce, entertained her sister’s then-4-year-old son and brought Ms. Richter ginger ale when she felt nauseous.Ms. Richter was working remotely, but with her husband, a physician, spending long hours at the hospital, Ms. Spigelman’s assistance made all the difference, Ms. Richter, 38, said.“People who have the capacity to give and love like she does, they don’t think of it as a unique quality,” Ms. Richter said. “But of course, it is.”After Ms. Richter gave birth, Ms. Spigelman moved in for about three weeks, washing dishes and waking up in the middle of the night to comfort her sister’s newborn, as Ms. Richter pumped breast milk.But the highlight came the day after Ms. Richter’s baby was born: For the first time since March, the sisters hugged.“People who have the capacity to give and love like she does, they don’t think of it as a unique quality,” Ms. Richter said of her sister. “But of course, it is.”Tess Ayano for The New York Times