David Wallace-Wells has a piece in the New York Times about hitting the five-year mark with Covid (although it started in 2019, and the first case in the US was reported on January 21st).
He seems to blame Covid for making America more divisive, but that didn't happen everywhere. Curious. He says Covid turned Americans into hyper-individualists:
"Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real. Covid unfolded on screens for most Americans, and although the experience was in many ways collective, everyone's screens were different: Some showed overflowing morgues, others revealing a sham. Soon, we began to worry less about how our actions affected others and more about how their affected us--a sense of interdependence giving way to anomie, atomization and entitlement."
I agree with him on the screens. We all had and have (it's still here!!) a different experience dependent on what we're exposed to. However, I'm not sure that much sense of interdependence was there prior to Covid, but more on anomie here. He says the "scale of death broke us," but I think few of us saw that or could wrap our heads around the numbers. I think he's bang on with this, though:
"When the initial emergency passed, it yielded less to survivors' guilt than survivors' resentment: With the pandemic minimized, all the disruptions and precautions seemed to many to have been overreactions. Today, when we retell the story of those years, we often diminish the actual disease, and in its place, everything else looms much larger: school closures, mask mandates, vaccine guidance. ... Survival became a measure of merit. ... You still hear Covid minimizers insisting, for instance, that no healthy child died from Covid; in fact, you hear it from sitting senators. The claim isn't true, but so what if it was? Did the unhealthy kids deserve it? Did obese adults? The unvaccinated? This was all a coping mechanism, but it turned Covid into a kind of morality tale in which your fate was ultimately your responsibility. Or, perhaps, your fault."
That's still the case that your illness is your fault, and in such a curious way. I'm chided for still wearing a mask in public, but when I explain that I love never being sick, it almost always provokes a story of the person's latest bout with a "flu." To some, it seems that the glory is in getting sick and surviving. This is the conclusion I've come to in all this: I'm seen as a coward or weirdo for actively avoiding illness. The praise or admonishment comes only after surviving or failing to survive a fight with a virus. I refuse to enter the ring, so I'm a loser by default. The problem with this mindset, of course, is that we have no ability to will our body to fight infection better or worse than anyone else. That's just dumb luck. It's like entering a ring with an ape -- it might take a nap, or it might pull off your head. Your fighting prowess has nothing to do with the outcome. I maintain that it's not courageous to get into that ring in the first place, and that it can be pretty easily avoided.
Then he gets into how Covid broke our faith in public health, although it wasn't Covid that did that, it was the piles of lies from people in authority, that "airborne is a military term" bullshit back in February 2020 couldn't have started things off much worse.
"Vaccines saved the lives of three million Americans, and yet hardly anyone tells the story of the pandemic in triumphant terms. ... Covid minimizers now run the Department of Health and Human Services and will soon run the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. In many states, laws block future public health restrictions, and some surveys show an even larger drop in trust in government than for scientists and doctors. ... The rise of DIY health doesn't just reflect distrust of our institutions. It's also a natural response to the way Covid made us all personally vulnerable."
I take some comfort in the unification around Ukraine and against US tactics and policy. Not a lot of comfort because we're sitting ducks between the now overt US-Russia alliance, but we might have places that will help out or take us in if necessary. I mean, "elbows up" only gets us so far when our military history and weapons' stockpiling has been largely based on peacekeeping.
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| From a parade in Dusseldorf, Germany |
Wallace-Wells suggests Covid marked the peak and end of protest. Wha...??
"The public seemed much less receptive to protest. Anything that disrupted the daily lives of ordinary people was now an unaccepted intrusion, whether it be a march in the street, a masking recommendation or an encampment on the campus quad."
He has that in the past tense, and I can see that in the campus protests about the invasion and genocide in Gaza, but I think we're back. There are anti-Elon/Trump/Vance protests running everywhere. People are royally pissed.
He thinks Covid shattered cities, raising homicide and homelessness rates, and causing alcoholism and antisocial behaviours, but I think that trajectory was already well underway. I had noticed a dramatic rise in tents in my area years before Covid, entirely caused by lack of rent controls. It's impossible to rent a room here on a minimum wage salary. We needed to re-regulate housing ages ago. In the schools, kids being rude in class was creeping up slowly until Trump was elected the first time, then suddenly racist slurs became seen as acceptable language. Covid might have exacerbated the situation, but I think honoured public figures behaving in antisocial ways kickstarted it all into high gear.
I skimmed through his take on how it affected who won in each election, but definitely Covid affected how we work, for better of worse. That change won't be easily undone as many people relish some benefits of working from home. It tanks the corporate real estate market if people are allowed, but it could do a lot for the climate if there are fewer cars on the road and if long-distance meetings become zoom calls. We could restructure things, making offices into cheap housing to solve homelessness, but people in power will take a financial hit, so that's highly unlikely to happen.
Covid increased government debt but the economy thrived. "In the wake of the pandemic, it grew so fast that it offset not only the losses from the shutdowns of 2020 but also the losses from the Great Recession more than a decade earlier." But inflation increased, and the rich countries didn't do enough to vaccinate the whole world. He mentions really briefly that the connection between the economy and "consumer sentiment" has been broken, but doesn't dive into it much. Any emergency can change our relationship with luxuries. How we prioritize everything in our lives changed pretty significantly.
It started earlier than Covid, but absolutely the anti-vaxxers came out of the woodwork once a new vaccine was on the table. It really didn't help that we were told it was going to save us, then came all the "break-through" infections, then the public realized it was more like the uncertain help of flu shots than a one-and-done polio shot. Experts knew it wasn't going to be affected by herd immunity back in June 2020, before the vaccine even existed. By January 2022, it was clear to the public that vaccines were only effective for a few months. That just added to our distrust of public health officials.
Wallace-Wells said,
"Before Covid, free speech activists were primarily concerned with noxious conservatives getting accosted on or disinvited from college campuses. But the cone of complaint quickly expanded. ... It led Elon Musk to buy Twitter. It was telling that, to explain the existential importance of this acquisition, he compared the threat of leftist thinking to a virus--then illustrated the depth of the supposed rot, first and foremost, with the release of some of Twitter's internal documents."
He goes on to suggest Covid caused Trump's win and revived reactionary ideas about race and gender, but I'm not convinced Covid was paramount to those. But finally he gets to the kids:
"More than 1,600 American children have died of Covid --nearly 80% of them after in-person learning resumed in fall 2021--but we talk about their experience of Covid, now, primarily in terms of school closures and learning loss. Measured by test scores, the pandemic damaged learning, though international comparisons show America persevered better than many peers, including places with much shorter closures. Other feared side effects, like teen suicide, didn't materialize. But the cultural effects, outside of school, appear generationally significant. There was a pandemic dating recession that may linger, and a stark political divide appears to have opened up between those members of Gen Z who were already in college during the pandemic peak and who more closely resembled the social-justice stereotype of the prepandemic years and those who were still in high school, who look much more like a lasting reactionary counterculture. The rightward swing of Covid teenagers, too, appears global. ... As many as one million American children suffered from [Long Covid] at least for a time. But there are about four million more newly disabled Americans now than there were before the pandemic, and the number reporting cognitive disabilities alone has grown by 43% since 2019--an increase significantly larger than in the five years before Covid."
He ends by acknowledging what an affront it is to realize we're still vulnerable to disease.
"The world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost."
Um... We have still not reckoned with all we are losing.
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