By Michael F. Duggan
Yes, I know, it’s not really over.
Unlike popular wars, there are no parades and celebrations after pandemics. The COVID-19 virus is still among us; a couple hundred Americans still die from it every day, give or take, and the number of new infections is diminishing. The emergence of another killer strain of the disease sometime in the indefinite future is a possibility. But the worst of the great visitation is perhaps a year or more behind us. Gone are the days of refrigerator trucks serving as temporary morgues outside of large urban hospitals, and a mostly maskless status quo has quietly and unselfconsciously crept back. After so many months, “COVID fatigue” had set in, and it was to be expected.
The country is different now, altered by the disease. The pandemic drove the trend of working from home by orders of magnitude, and the number of Americans who no longer go to the office every day is at a level that would have taken decades to reach in more ordinary times. High school girls now attend class in pajamas and bedroom slippers. It is possible that the suit and tie (and the jacket and tie) is dead in all but the highest levels of professional life, and outside of the most special of occasions. On its face, this accelerated casualness looks like a chronic lack of effort. How are we to expect people to return to greater rigor after three years where solitude and diminished standards were the norm?
And then there are the casualties. There are young people who feel cheated out of milestone high school and college experiences, and we can only wonder what the long-term impact of the pandemic will be on those who were three to six years old at the height of the crisis, and were just becoming aware of the world and social interactions. There are the “long haulers” whose health may be permanently damaged by a virus whose symptoms ranged from none at all to a slow gasping death alone in tent-like hospital wards.
And of course there are the dead, 1,121,819 Americans by the latest court, and the real number might be much higher. That number is almost twice as great as the one for all of the U.S. combat deaths in all of our wars, given as 666, 441. In the same way that the country quickly forgot the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 and got on with the 1920s, or how we have never faced the Vietnam War with complete frankness, we are not acting like a country that has been through a world and national-historical tragedy of the largest proportions. We are not acting like a country that has just lost more than a million of our neighbors.
I suspect that there will be important histories written about the COVID-19 pandemic over the coming years and decades. But then, how many Americans really read history?