It’s been five years, and more than 20 million deaths globally. The first official case was in December 2019. The World Health Organization designated Covid-19 a public health emergency at the end of January 2020, the U.S. government declared it a national emergency on March 13, and every single state ordered or recommended schools close at some point between March 16 and March 27. What followed was trauma: years of mass mortality, inescapable infection and deep disruption, even to the lives of the relatively safe.
Next week I’ll be publishing an essay reflecting on where that world-historical whirlwind eventually left us, focused less on the emergency itself than on all the ways, both obvious and subtle, an unthinkable — even unbelievable — mortality event transformed our world. But today I just want to remind us where things started, half a decade ago now.
My first hint came via Twitter on Dec. 31, 2019, when I saw the health and medicine journalist Helen Branswell warning of “unexplained pneumonias” in China. The plot beats that would follow were, in certain ways, familiar enough, Hollywood and science fiction having taught us all about global health emergencies and what might be done to stop them. But although I could easily imagine a pandemic unfolding onscreen, I couldn’t really believe we’d end up living through one, so deep were my intuitions that plagues were — at least in the wealthy world — a thing of the past. Whatever I’d heard from scientists about the risks of this or that future outbreak, I was living firmly in epidemiological denial.
Two months later, in the first days of March, I found myself having dinner with an old friend who told me that he and his father had recently made a casual bet about how many Americans would ultimately die of the disease. His father had bet the total would be under 100,000; my friend had guessed more. “What do you think?” he asked me. I grimaced a little. “I’d take the over at a million,” I said.
I was reminded of this all recently when reading about a similar bet that the writer and podcaster Sam Harris said he made with his former friend Elon Musk at the beginning of the pandemic. (It’s ugly but perhaps illuminating to realize how many responded to the scary news by gambling on it.) Musk’s intuition was that the whole thing would just go away. On March 19, 2020, he tweeted that “on current trends,” the country was headed to no new cases sometime by the end of April, and he bet Harris that the outbreak would produce fewer than 35,000 cases in total. When the official count of Covid deaths passed 35,000 in April, Harris wrote to Musk to ask, cheekily, whether this meant he’d won the bet. Musk did not respond. In fact, to read Harris’s retelling of it, that was the end of their friendship and the moment he watched his old comrade disappear into a kind of alternate reality.
Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths to a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.
In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected, but as early as March 2020 Donald Trump and Deborah Birx (who helped run the White House’s Covid response) appeared to be referencing Ferguson’s figure to claim credit for avoiding more than two million deaths — a success they explicitly attributed to shelter-in-place guidelines, business closings and travel restrictions.
Five years later, though the world has been scarred by all that death and illness, it is considered hysterical to narrate the history of the pandemic by focusing on it. Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics now run the country’s health agencies, but the backlash isn’t just on the right. Many states have tied the hands of public health authorities in dealing with future pandemic threats, and mask bans have been implemented in states as blue as New York. Everyone has a gripe with how the pandemic was handled, and many of them are legitimate. But our memories are so warped by denial, suppression and sublimation that Covid revisionism no longer even qualifies as news. When I come across an exchange like this one from last weekend, in which Woody Harrelson called Fauci evil on Joe Rogan’s show, or this one from last year, in which Rogan and Tony Hinchcliffe casually attribute a rise in excess and all-cause mortality to the aftereffects of vaccination, I don’t even really flinch.
To be clear, their suggestion is spurious. (Ironically, the vaccines are the reason we can even entertain such speculation.) In some countries where vaccination was more universal than here, such as the U.K., shots effectively brought an end to the pandemic emergency. And as I wrote two years ago, total mortality through the pandemic has tracked so closely with known Covid waves — spiking when cases were also spiking, subsiding when the disease was also in retreat — it was disingenuous to pretend the “unexplained” death was driven primarily by something other than the disease itself. American contrarians have often pointed to Sweden to suggest a lighter-touch alternative was possible, but even the architect of that policy, who owes his global stature to the story of Swedish exceptionalism, has spent the five-year anniversary emphasizing, among other lessons, how similar his country’s approach was to the rest of the world.
The pandemic response wasn’t perfect. But the pandemic itself was real, and punishing. Above all, it revealed our vulnerability — biological, social and political. And in the aftermath of the emergency, Americans have largely looked away, choosing to see the experience less in terms of death and illness than in terms of social hysteria and even public health overreach. For many, the main lesson was that in the world of humans, as in the world of microbes, it’s dog-eat-dog out there.
But the consequences and aftershocks were also more subtle and diffuse: it isn’t easy to live in isolation and in fear, often largely online and surrounded by exceptional illness and mortality, as we watched aspects of the world and our own lives we’d long taken for granted be withdrawn or torn apart. And it isn’t easy to get over all that, however eager we thought we were to “return to normal.” We lived through as many deaths as some of the worst-case scenarios predicted, and without an initial spasm of inspiring solidarity and miraculous biomedical intervention, it could have been worse. But when we came out the other side — 1.5 million fewer of us — we were, as a country, exhausted, resentful, deluded and distrustful. A huge amount of the world in which we now reside was formed in that crucible. I will write more about that next week.
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