Five years ago, Covid shut down the world. Have we learned anything?
Most people want to move forward, not look backwards, but questions remain.
Last week, the world marked the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic, which killed more than seven million people. The first reports of the virus had appeared at the end of 2019. But then, in one day, March 11, 2020, things got real.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Covid-19 virus to be a pandemic. President Trump addressed the nation about the seriousness of the threat. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, testified to Congress that conditions were “going to get worse.” The stock market dropped 700 points at open. The NBA suspended its season.
So began the Covid years, the most life-upsetting time that most of us have ever experienced and perhaps the first event to push 9/11 off the front page of history. After that world-changing day, the pandemic would continue for more than three years, until May 2023, when both the WHO and President Biden declared that it was over.
In many ways, the virus that ate the world has receded in our shared memory. Social distancing isn’t a thing anymore. Most people’s comfort zones with regards to their proximity to others in public has shrunk from six feet to three feet to non-existent.
People who still wear masks in public now get double-takes or startled glances. Many healthcare settings stopped mandating masks almost three years ago and, even before that, masking up in a medical facility had started to seem less like a public health strategy and more like removing your shoes in someone’s home when asked to do so.
Also, people’s vaccination status is no longer a topic of conversation, when not long ago, it determined not just whether they could get into a lot of places, but whether they were looked upon as social pariahs. And the ubiquitous public messaging that admonished people to get vaccinated, then get vaccinated again, then get boosted and then get super boosted—that has completely vanished from public discourse.
In other words, we moved on. We didn’t process the experience. And, for the most part, we haven’t asked too many questions about it.
A commonly-cited-but-utterly-false talking point is that the only statistic that matters during a pandemic is deaths. Maybe that’s true if you’re a census taker or a demographer. But, otherwise, it’s a jarringly narrow view. Because, to ordinary people, here’s a partial list of Covid-related statistics that also matter: suicides; serious health problems that have developed from contracting Covid; other health problems with causal links to Covid; nutrition deficiency; mental illness cases; addiction and substance abuse cases; domestic assaults and other crime; jobs lost; income lost; businesses closed; bankruptcies; foreclosures; defaults; evictions; debt; learning gaps; juvenile delinquency; divorces and other family split-ups; screen dependencies.
All these social ills increased during the pandemic. But, the data is limited because public reporting is focused so heavily on the death count.
So, not surprisingly, press coverage of the five-year anniversary has mostly focused on the tragedy of Covid. The stories that have been reported have been ones of loss and heartbreak, intermingled with tales of hope, in which survivors have found some joy again, despite their pain and grief.
This may explain why there has been limited reporting on a bombshell revelation that was broke by German news outlets at the end of the week. Evidently, way back in 2020, the German Federal Intelligence Service (BDN) made an assessment that there was between an 80 and 95 percent probability that Covid had leaked from a laboratory. Yet, the world never learned of this review until now because German Chancellor Angela Merkel opted not to release the report.
The BDN assessment reinforces the conclusions of subsequent, lower-confidence analyses from the U.S. Energy Department, the FBI and the CIA. The findings of the Energy Department and the FBI weren’t disclosed until 2023, (and the CIA’s findings weren’t released until 2025), by which point it had become more socially acceptable to question established Covid narratives.
Recall the opinion climate of that era, as far as what positions were deemed appropriate to hold, concerning what was going on. A consensus was imposed and enforced by our societal institutions. “Good Americans” wore face shields or masks; practiced social distancing; used hand sanitizer; abided by travel restrictions, lockdowns and curfews; limited their social gatherings; got their Covid shot, got their second Covid shot, got their booster, got their second booster; and—most importantly—wholeheartedly supported all these measures.
Oh, yes, and good Americans believed that Covid was of natural origin. Specifically, they believed that the virus crossed the species barrier at a live animal market in the Wuhan province of China.
Those who dissented from the established consensus on Covid were torn apart. They were called selfish, heartless and anti-science.
And those who believed that the pandemic may have originated in the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, which worked with coronaviruses? Racists. Good Americans knew Covid started in a wet market.
The consensus enforcers even introduced a scientific term into the common vocabulary to reinforce their messaging: “zoonotic,” referring to the spread of diseases from animals to humans. Good Americans knew Covid had zoonotic origins.
[I must confess that this hypothesis has always seemed implausible to me. It’s true that animal-to-human transmissions have caused viral pandemics before. But, for me, the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the location of the outbreak makes this a case of Occam’s razor.
And what I really don’t get is how a racial aspect was attached to the so-called “lab leak theory.” Most of us who believe it don’t think that the Chinese malevolently released the virus into the world. It was a leak. But, at least initially, proponents of the theory were portrayed as if we were suggesting that the pandemic was planned by a bunch of martial arts masters in silk clothing, sitting around a table in an upstairs room in a Chinese restaurant, stroking their Fu-Manchus.]
However, those who downplayed Covid had their own consensus enforcing institutions (e.g. conservative media), and they were similarly absolutist. Sticking to the notion that, if we couldn’t see Covid, it must be nothing worthy of alarm. Dismissing the idea that science is ever justification to restrict personal liberties. Shaming anyone who held to the established consensus. Refusing to extend grace to officials who misstepped and overreached in the course of trying to keep people safe.
The reality was that when Covid hit, it was new, it was moving fast, and it caught the world flat-footed. There was no time to analyze it under controlled conditions. Countries had to respond before the virus decimated their populations and overwhelmed their healthcare systems. In terms of policy responses, it was logical to err on the side of caution. And so, to different extents, governments came down hard on the side of public health measures.
In many places, the policies that were enacted had a devastating effect on businesses and jobs. Extended school closures damaged the education of an entire generation of students. And prolonged isolation and limited human interaction led to a deterioration of people’s physical and mental health.
So, some folks protested. Others defied curfews, lockdowns and capacity restrictions. Many simply vented their frustrations online.
But, good Americans were taught to see those people as public health menaces and worse. Those people, in turn, were socialized to see supporters of restrictive measures as callous totalitarians and worse.
The net effect was the politicization of an issue in which every living person was a stakeholder. Defeating Covid demanded total teamwork, but we still lined up on opposing sides and treated it like yet another political football.
Portions of this post have been adapted from my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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