Covid Weirdness: Useful Lessons from the Pandemic

There’s nothing like a belatedly revealed sex party to get Covid-19 back in the news. The candid-camera confession by Jay Varma, New York City’s Covid czar, that in 2020 he and his wife were keeping their eyes wide shut at the same time he was helping Mayor Bill de Blasio keep the city locked down would alone have sufficed to revive pandemic-era discontents. His over-the-top rationalization that, because of his stressful position, he needed “some way to blow off steam every now and then” and that in doing so he was being his “authentic self” has intensified the effect.

The sheer weirdness of this story has helped it to stand out more than four years after Covid-19 began. But as the pandemic recedes into the past, America’s collective memory of it is fading. It’s possible that our experience of the novel coronavirus will linger mostly as an anomaly, a time people will want to forget and from which we can learn little applicable to ordinary life. Yet much of what it revealed about the world, from global institutions down to individual people, can and should be instructive.

About the Author

Jack Butler

Jack Butler is a former submissions editor at National Review.

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There’s nothing like a belatedly revealed sex party to get Covid-19 back in the news. The candid-camera confession by Jay Varma, New York City’s Covid czar, that in 2020 he and his wife were keeping their eyes wide shut at the same time he was helping Mayor Bill de Blasio keep the city locked down would alone have sufficed to revive pandemic-era discontents. His over-the-top rationalization that, because of his stressful position, he needed “some way to blow off steam every now and then” and that in doing so he was being his “authentic self” has intensified the effect.

The sheer weirdness of this story has helped it to stand out more than four years after Covid-19 began. But as the pandemic recedes into the past, America’s collective memory of it is fading. It’s possible that our experience of the novel coronavirus will linger mostly as an anomaly, a time people will want to forget and from which we can learn little applicable to ordinary life. Yet much of what it revealed about the world, from global institutions down to individual people, can and should be instructive.