The disappearing pandemic

Boulder still has a couple of bookstores, and I like to sometimes indulge in the old-fashioned habit of browsing through shelves of actual physical books. While doing so recently I ran into 1919: The Year That Changed America. This is a popular history, intended primarily I think for school age readers, that includes extensive discussions of Prohibition, women’s suffrage, the Red Scare, the great labor strikes of the time, and the extreme racial terrorism that accompanied the return of troops at the end of the Great War, among other topics.

It was published on the 100th anniversary of that year, and won a National Book Award, so it would appear to be a serious and careful work within its particular genre (popular history for younger readers).

Guess what, per its index, doesn’t merit even a mention? That’s right, the great Spanish Influenza pandemic, which peaked the previous fall, but still killed about 200,000 more Americans in 1919 alone (equivalent to 600,000 today, i.e., more than during the worst year of the Covid pandemic). At the time, few if any events had a more profound effect on day to day life in America, as cities and towns struggled throughout 1919 to find whatever set of public health policies would best ameliorate the ravages of this terrible disease, that killed countless people in the prime of life.

But a century later the whole thing was, in the context of a book dedicated to a granular look at American history in that particular year, completely forgotten.

I believe a vaguely similar thing is in the process of happening with the great Covid pandemic of 2020 through . . . Somehow, just three years and probably around 1.5 million dead Americans later, it’s like the whole thing never really happened. The biggest long term social effect of Covid will probably be how it created an inflection point for the adoption of work from home policies, but even that is being pushed back by the relentless inertia toward status quo normalization.

We all lived through this crazy time, but we are all forgetting it now. That, I suppose, is how human memory and its cultural manifestations relentlessly create a past we can all live with today.