Covid six years on

Six years ago today, also a Friday, was the day when the first big shutdowns hit in America. The following Monday we had a faculty meeting at the law school where we were told that the rest of the semester was going to be conducted via Zoom. I had never heard of Zoom until that day, so my expertise in handling this technology was possibly suboptimal.

Six years later, I have a keen appreciation of how the so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 got so effectively memory-holed as a cultural matter. References to it afterwards would be few and far between, although I encountered a couple in, respectively, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, and Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, in which the Spanish flu actually provides a key plot point.

Today the whole thing often seems like a particularly unpleasant dream of some sort, although some of the social changes wrought by it are profound, especially in regard to the mainstreaming by neofascists and their fellow travelers of anti-vax attitudes, and the proliferation of work from home arrangements, although there’s now a big pushback from employers in regard to the latter.

I’ve also actually encountered a lot of revisionist resentment among people who had young children when the pandemic broke out, of the “I’m a liberal but the shutdowns went too far” variety. I mean as far as elementary school goes they may well have gone too far in retrospect — a critical caveat — since it’s clear that serious educational costs were incurred by closing schools to in-person attendance. But even six years later the costs and benefits involved in going to remote schooling remain complex, and at the time, with no vaccine and terrifying weekly mortality rates, the decisions made were in my view clearly the right ones, given the information then available.

BTW the period life expectancy losses produced by the pandemic took four years to erase completely, as only in 2024 did life expectancy in America get back to where it was in 2019 — technically it was very slightly higher. Life expectancy in the US still lags that in developed countries very badly, mostly for reasons that become easy to understand if you read books such as Evicted and $2 A Day, which we covered in my class on the economics of the American legal system over the last couple of weeks. The shock that people like LBJ and RFK Sr. experienced when they saw first hand the conditions in rural Appalachia and the deep South in the late1960s should be much more shocking today, when the country is no less than three times wealthier in per capita GDP than it was then. But that shock continues to be avoided by the most effective of all traditional methods, which is to remain unaware that these people and places exist.