It was around this time four years ago that the stark reality of the Covid-19 pandemic became apparent to the world. Though the virus was already spreading seriously in other countries, such as China and Italy, by this time, the World Health Organization officially declared it a pandemic on March 11. On March 12, Ohio governor Mike DeWine became the first in the country to announce school closures in his state; other states soon followed. Mass culture began to respond as well; also on March 12, the NBA suspended the current season until further notice. Similar suspensions and cancellations were soon to follow, “out of an abundance of caution.”
That these actions feel like dispatches from another world may help account for the fact that many of us would rather not think about that period anymore, or at least those parts of it. In the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Christakis called this “process of forgetting” something “people have done after every other pandemic in history.” He identifies some aspects of the governmental response to Covid that we should remember with anger, such as the actions of those who “exaggerated or misread the risks to school-age children, a posture that has yet to be fully reckoned with.”
But Christakis is more concerned by the distrust of authority and minimization of Covid’s effects enabled by Americans’ failure to “coalesce around a collective memory of the pandemic.” If the disease had been even more serious, or proved especially harmful to children (as the Spanish flu did), he argues, the public reaction as well as the collective memory would have been quite different. Americans would have tolerated even more extreme interruptions of their personal lives, and the lingering trauma of the disease itself would have been even worse.
We are lucky that Covid-19 wasn’t more severe. But the post-Covid “suspicion of authority and expertise” by Americans, especially of scientific and medical institutions, that Christakis laments didn’t come out of nowhere. Many authorities acted in a monomaniacal and heavy-handed manner out of whack even with what we came to know about the virus relatively early on. They viewed all of life through the prism of one virus, and gave us the failed experiment of lockdowns. Guidance from such agencies as the CDC was “ambiguous, confusing, or altogether wrong-headed,” as Brian J. Miller and M. Anthony Mills wrote. Fundamentally, those who suddenly possessed great power over our lives acted like they did not trust people to act rationally, which contributed to a negative feedback loop that has helped to bring about the very trust crisis Christakis now laments.
The period itself also saw immense pressure to coalesce around accepted opinion, on the efficacy of lockdowns (as Martin Kulldorff recounts in City Journal), on China’s culpability for Covid-19 in the first place, and more. Yet Christakis, worried about forgetting, does not mention China in his Wall Street Journal article. The effects of this period linger with us still, in ways he also does not mention. Recently released CDC data, for example, found a 29 percent increase between 2016–2017 and 2020–2021 in deaths from alcohol use, as lonely people looked to dark places for succor. Four years later, if we are to avoid forgetting the lessons of Covid, we should not be selective in our memory.