Three years of Covid
By 
This week marks the third anniversary of when the Covid pandemic really started in the USA, at least as a social matter. I still have a vivid memory of eating in a restaurant exactly three years ago today and suddenly realizing that this might be the last time I would do this for a very long time. A couple of days later all the schools and sports leagues shut down, and for weeks even the parks were closed, at least in Boulder.
I’m starting to get a better idea of why the last great pandemic, almost exactly 100 years earlier, disappeared so completely from cultural memory. Even today, just three years after it started and two years after it peaked during the great wave of the winter of 2021, the whole experience is beginning to take on an unreal flavor, as of some unpleasant dream that you try to shake off after you realize it didn’t really happen.
And I’m afraid that, as a political matter, there’s going to be a sense it which the pandemic in this country didn’t really happen, at least in the minds of the 40% or so of the population that’s pretty much impervious to facts and evidence on any subject, and especially this one.
A a couple of general points:
(1) The endemic stage of Covid, which we’ve been in for nearly a year now, is killing about 150,000 Americans per year. Three years ago that would have been considered an extreme public health emergency; now it’s a matter of something very close to total social indifference. And we still have no real idea what sorts of chronic long-term health problems will plague the survivors of the plague.
(2) The two biggest long-term changes the pandemic will end up producing are a significant increase in the number of Americans who work from home, and the mainstreaming of anti-vaccine attitudes among the right wing. The former is something that will be, I think, a genuine long-term change in the economy and the culture. The latter may be as well, although I still cling to the hope that the cumulative radicalization of the right wing and its institutional embodiment in the Republican party has some sort of break point or collapse mechanism, short of actual civil war.