Five Years Ago, We Were Terrified of Covid. We Were Right to Be Afraid.

Five years since a novel virus spread everywhere, its hard to remember what the beginning was like.

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...

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...

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... David Wallace-Wells

Thinking back on the past five years, what were the biggest long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on you? In what ways did it change you or your perception of the world? Click here to respond...