Five Years On, Ghosts of a Pandemic We Didn't Imagine Still Haunt Us

New York Times

15-03-2025

Five years later, the everyday has returned to the pleasant New Jersey town of Maplewood. About the only visible trace of what was endured is the urgent plea that still adorns the caution-yellow marquee of the old movie theater.
There for the last five years, ever since the theater closed at the dawn of the dread, it says: STAY HEALTHY.
The letter L is tipped slightly, like someone staggered by a blow. That letter L might as well be us, upright but still staggering from a pandemic that killed more than seven million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the Maplewoods and metropolises of America.
Time's passage has granted the illusion of distance. The veils of protection have dropped from faces, and crowds are once again bellying up to the bar, their conversations carrying echoes of what was being talked about at the start of 2020, as if the last five years had been excised from the calendar.
But then something noticed, something heard, unearths something buried. A message on a closed movie theater's marquee. A face mask shoved in a drawer. A silhouette of footprints on a subway platform.
The strains of a familiar John Prine song, maybe 'Angel From Montgomery,' which at first makes you smile because you love all things Prine, but then you remember that he died in 2020 of complications from Covid, and before the next chord plays your mind is back in that dystopian time.
The collective impulse to compartmentalize and forget has kicked in before. The flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 infected nearly a fifth of the American population, yet an early chronicling of the 1920s that is now considered a classic of its kind — 'Only Yesterday,' written by the journalist Frederick Lewis Allen and published in 1931 — made only passing mention of the Great Influenza: just three dozen words for a national disaster that killed anywhere from a half-million to 850,000 people.
A century later, that impulse to suppress has returned, muddling our sense of time. The coronavirus pandemic can seem so safely submerged in the past that we sometimes have to stop and ask ourselves: Did that really happen?
It did.
Five years ago this month, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the federal government declared a national emergency — and the United States all but lurched to a halt. Schools, offices, stores and places of worship closed, and sheltering in place, a concept antithetical to community, became an unnatural way of life.
There was at first something sci-fi unreal about the coronavirus — an invisible enemy whose means of contagion remained mysterious. But then came the reality of death, by the thousands, the tens of thousands: so many that hospitals and funeral homes could not keep up; so many that bodies were stacked almost like cordwood in refrigerated trucks.
The pandemic disrupted the ancient and sacred rituals of mourning, denying many the primal need to say goodbye. Unable to gather, we could not recite prayers together, or share comforting hugs or even toss a parting rose upon on a casket. We watched the burials of our loved ones from a distance, often in the cocoon of cars.
Remember?
As scientists raced to develop a vaccine, we lived in the uncertain, even the absurd, as government officials under pressure struggled to land upon the best course of action. Amid this life-and-death confusion, we slathered our hands with sanitizer whenever we touched a doorknob. We stood in line to walk like zombies through the disquieting stillness of supermarkets. We cotton-swabbed our noses while sitting in our cars, shoved the packed-up sample through a pharmacy's drive-up window — and waited to see if the touch of that doorknob, or the walk through that supermarket, had risked our lives.
Nearly a year into the madness, a vaccine became widely available, and most of us, though not all, grasped how vaccinations would stem the contagion and save lives. New terms joined the Covid vernacular. In addition to waves and surges and hot spots, we had the three witches of variants: Alpha, Delta and Omicron. We asked one another a single question — Are you Pfizer or Moderna? — as we fretted whether we'd chosen the most efficacious vaccine.
Finally, in April 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed into law a resolution to end the coronavirus national emergency declared three years earlier. The pandemic storm, it seemed, was behind us now.
Nonsense. We continue to live in its wake.
The repercussions of Covid extend beyond the hundreds of people it still kills a week, beyond the many who still suffer from long Covid, beyond the ghostly restaurants and storefronts that could not withstand the sudden and sustained plummet in business.
A cohort of adolescents and young adults missed out on the learning that occurs in and out of the classroom: the labs and proms and presentations and graduations. At the same time, many of their parents continue to work from the isolation of their homes, a virtual-first experience that frees up time at the expense of any creativity sparks from face-to-face contact.
The pandemic turned us against one another. Were we pro-mask or anti-mask? Pro- or anti-vaccination? Did we believe in the sanctity of individual rights or in suspending certain freedoms for the communal good?
The anger spurred by masks and other Covid-related rules and requirements helped to further fuel a distrust of government: a distrust embraced by those now in government. Vaccinations for the coronavirus recently saved millions of lives in this country, and yet the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services — the federal agency created to protect the health of the American public — has long been hostile to this tried-and-true method of immunization.
At times it seems the collective impulse to suppress has worked too well. As though we never heard the hum of those refrigerated trucks. As though we have forgotten just how vulnerable we were, and are.