Addison, no one enjoys and values your thought processes more than I do, but I think you are wrong on this question. According to Bing Copilot the median age of those who died from COVID in the United States, was seventy-eight years old. Thus, the vast majority who died from COVID must have been over sixty-five, past retirement age.
I think the reason that no one passes on information effectively from experienced employees to new hires at Lowe's is that the experienced employees tend to just up and quit when they find a better job. They never have a chance to train their replacement.
I believe that our country has suffered from a form of collective PTSD due to the pandemic. There was a MASS loss of grandparents. Several million still suffer from long covid, which is where the loss in the working age population may be felt. However, collective pain became most acute when inflation broke out, and so that's what we tend to attribute our bad feelings to.
"I think the reason that no one passes on information effectively from experienced employees to new hires at Lowe's is that the experienced employees tend to just up and quit when they find a better job. They never have a chance to train their replacement."
What I've found (personally and recently) is that many experienced employees also leave because they're just plain hitting retirement age and want to retire. And not just at Lowe's! Those experienced employees often want to, and try to, train and hand over to their replacements but often find management won't allow time for that: neither from those wanting to train, nor for those who would benefit from the training.
I 'retired' (it hasn't quite taken) in 2021 and had been trying to train/hand-over some quite specialised knowledge and skills since at least 2017 - but found no management support and no takers once they realised that (a) this was hard; and (b) management wasn't freeing their time for it.
Even now I am officially retired (but back on 'part-time/casual' contract) I'm still trying to hand over: yet still no takers. Some of this stuff is critical to their operations. 'They' must know that: it's why they keep me on contract, and keep assigning me work. As and when I do fully, no-kidding, retire it will leave them with a hole that's difficult to fill. I'm trying to pre-fill it for them but they won't seem to enable that. Go figure.
Beyond death rates, the retirement rate shot up sharply during the pandemic. The most experienced, older workers were more likely to call time on their careers once the pandemic hit - would have been nice to be in this group! You see this most clearly on airplanes, at restaurants, and, yes, at Lowe’s. I’ve personally felt a turning of the tide - a stabilization - in the past year but it is still hit and miss depending on the business. We may not get back to 2019, but it will get better.
Sadly, after 30 years of working, it’s accurate to my experience that one is never adequately shown the ropes for a new job. The first three months are all learning curve, figuring out the parameters of the role. Then you get really good at it and figure out how to do it better and find ways to expand the parameters of the job description, make it your own.
I definitely agree that there's a lot to this, but I'm not sure it's actually "losing 1 million people". That explanation has always seemed too pat to me, and although I'm not a complete cynic, I just think people are more self-absorbed than that. What rings truer is the _disruption_ to daily routines, of which the loss of 1M people was only a marginal contributor.
Zooming out, though... IMO we're simultaneously in the end-stage of the "Bowling Alone" pathology, but also on the cusp of an explosive renaissance of civic life -- the "end of the beginning" of a phase of urban rediscovery and renewal that started with the first generation of gentrifying hipsters back in the 90's.
I suspect there's another component, too: the Cost Disease. You know how before 2008, most cities had already reached their outer practical limits of sprawl (the mythical ~1hr commute), and were just kind of going on this zombie autopilot mode, which abruptly stopped when the financial crisis hit -- at which point the halted sprawl spent the next decade morphing into a general housing crisis?
Well, I wonder if something similar is happening with the Cost Disease via the Housing Theory Of Everything. Like the housing crisis, its core drivers are decades-old, and the Cost Disease was steadily getting worse "on autopilot"... but this one big disruptive event and its attendant inflation spike really revealed the bubble that was there all along.
And so, now we're at a place where the contradictions can't be ignored anymore. Buying a house is finally out of reach for most of the middle class in anywhere but the deep exurbs and dying cities. It used to be that high wages just meant a middle-class family could afford a reasonably prosperous life; now they're merely the result of middle-class families chasing wage increases just to catch up with a reasonably prosperous life. Everyone else's insane housing costs become the prices that no one can afford.
It seems like we've hit all time highs with how polarized the country is. Factor in how easy it is to access guns and the US is a scary place to be right now. But underneath it all, I think the majority is in the center and media just highlights the extremists.
Better urban design would solve so many underlying issues, it's so easy to be a tough guy or a Karen behind a computer screen, but face to face not so much.
I'm not sure if this is related to what you're talking about, especially since I'm a generation ahead of you.
Lowe's is a last resort for me. I'd rather go to the neighborhood hardware store, where they ask what I'm looking for when I walk in and 99% of the time, it's there and they take me right to it. In and out in 5 minutes or less.
Or shopping at the local small chain grocery store, which costs a bit more but doesn't make me tired when I walk in, like a typical Kroger's that has 132,000 square feet I have to traverse to find what I need. And I love to walk, regularly putting in 4-6 miles daily! Just not when I'm shopping.
My neighborhood restaurants are locally owned, often by people who live in the neighborhood. Service is great and I know at least a few of the people who serve me by name.
It's all reminiscent of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, I guess. And that feeling of wanting to shop smaller and more locally intensified for me as a result of the pandemic. The connections fostered by living on a smaller scale matter more to me now than ever.
I work in the field of employee ownership and one constant is true - proximity to ownership matters.
Large organizations have abstract ownership that diminishes a social pro-accountability groupishness. It is its own form of continuity. The US economy seems to favor consolidation and supply chain integration- efficient for sure.
Effective over the longer term? I don’t think so - it dehumanizes at a time we actually need human passion and connection.
That's awesome to hear! I truly believe that employee owned companies and cooperatives are our best bet going forward. I used to work for an ESOP, and until we got bought, it was one of the best places to work. Which all tanked under the new owners. But even then, at least the folks who got the payout from the buyout were the actual employees. Especially folks that had spent their whole careers there. Honestly, very just.
I don't agree that continuity should be valued in itself, but there are many contexts in which it has instrumental value. The level-of-service in retail is one such example.
At the lower tiers of work, employers assume that "good" employees are interchangeable. Even if these jobs are not high-skill and high-knowledge, they still require skill and knowledge. In retail, the demands for store knowledge grow with the size of the store and with the breadth of the stock and services. This takes time to learn, so retention of sales staff is important. But retailers do not pay for retention. I am sometimes frustrated with customer service, but I remind myself that this is probably a management problem, not a problem of the employee's making.
I have a hack that works at Lowe's and Home Depot. I order an item online for pick up, which means an employee has to find it for you. They send an email when it's ready for pick up, and I just go to a locker with my code. No more Long March through the Big Box. If the item isn't what you hoped for, you can either return it immediately or just not check it out.
Unless it's Walmart, who will delay or substitute your order for an item that's right there on a shelf. Not enough people staffing the pickup orders..?
I agree that the vibecession is real and the pre-pandemic world might be lost forever. There was a pushfulness that was lost. The world is now as sepia as Mexico in an American movie, people quiet quit, not only their jobs.
But in my recollection, this happened more recently than the worst pandemic pain. And, in my case, it matches the time that I went from diligent saver to snowballing debt.
I didn't lose anyone that was close to the pandemic — no friend or relative died — so my experience may be different than other people. But I remember late 2020 and early to mid 2021 with fondness, as a time of optimism. But then something changed. And to me, that change was also financial.
I love your substack, but I have to be a bit mean here.
You've repeatedly asserted that conservatives were being selfish and un-Christian by advocating for an end to lockdowns and more limited mitigation measures. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were unjustly put out of business by the lockdowns; students' test scores of literacy and numeracy, particularly of poorer ones, plummeted and haven't recovered; mental health issues surged.
"Following the science" should have meant that high-risk people (the old and the sick) ought to isolate and take precautions, but everyone else (who had a near-zero chance of death) should have, within reason, gotten back to the business of civilization. Prolonged lockdowns were the cruel and un-Christian thing to do, and caused an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering. And I do find it galling that lockdown zealots continue to believe that lockdown skeptics were callous and selfish people, when *they* are the ones who inflicted terrible cruelty on vulnerable people just to satisfy their narcissistic neuroticism.
Some of this - much of this - is value judgments/judgment calls. I respect your view. The hyperbole and lack of charity from certain folks (I'm thinking heavily of the stuff First Things published) when I talk about Catholics/conservatives made it harder for me to consider the side they were representing.
I don't think that lack of charity was the main reason for lockdown skepticism. And I had at least two democrat friends admit to me straight out that harsh lockdowns that created an aura of helplessness and apocalyptic chaos was worthwhile to help defeat Donald Trump. So while I'm sure lockdown zealots believed they were on the side of the angels, they had some certifiable demons in their ranks.
We never really had any true lockdowns, though. All we ever had was just a vague assertion of "I dunno, you probably should go out and about too much". At most, there were recommended business closures or restrictions in the first couple months, and even those were pretty loosy-goosy, and often enforced more by the businesses themselves than anything. There was pretty much zero enforcement otherwise. The real malaise was that nobody felt safe because everything we did was so haphazard.
As a counterpoint, look at Australia. They had real, harsh lockdowns whenever the virus was detected in a community. But the key point was that they were hard, but temporary, only usually a few weeks. And while that seems harsh, in truth, it gave folks confidence to actually lead a normal life when restrictions were lifted. Compare that to the 2 years of endless malaise and uncertainty we faced, even when the thin veneer of restrictions was largely lifted early on.
It's worth noting that people already started not going out even before the initial restrictions were put in place. In truth, we locked ourselves down. But because that was untargeted and haphazard, it was ineffective, and quickly created burnout and strife.
Whether it was enforced by the private sector or the government isn't all that germane- most people were forced into social isolation.
The government should have informed people well about their risk levels, and then encouraged people to act accordingly. The majority of liberals in 2021 thought that the mortality rate of covid was more than 50%, when it was 0.3%. Being that badly misinformed probably was a huge factor in people's anger and neuroticism towards reasonable lockdown skeptics.
Look at all the narratives! Everybody's got an explanation, a theory, a bubble in the head. Is that the reason betting sites are flourishing? Also, what's with the backhand slap at Rusty Reno's First Things? That's a hit out of bounds. Cost you fifteen yards.
I think I was somewhat lucky - in December 2019, I got married and honeymooned. By the time I got vaxxed in April 2021, my wife had given birth to our first child, we had moved from a downtown apartment to an old, inner-ring suburban house in a walkable area that we got a great deal on, and I'd switched roles at work from one that required me to go in everyday during the pandemic to one where I could work from home more.
So, I had a lot of related life events all happen while everyone was locked down. And as such, the discontinuity with my pre-pandemic life seems very normal. And even during the pandemic - while I was agitated about going into work in April of 2020, by June I saw it as a blessing in disguise.
That said - and maybe this is easier for me to do - I kinda think we all shouldn't really dwell too much on the pandemic. We all had imperfect information, we all had to make our own choices, and we all had to deal with people we thought were too rigid and other we thought were too unconcerned. All of us had bad pandemic takes. And, despite a national leader who was uniquely terrible at uniting us - we did all make it through.
Sure, society was tested and stretched, as were all of us. And everybody lost somebody at that time. BUT! Our society is far more resilient than we think. It so far has survived this century - a major domestic attack on our largest city, two unpopular wars that didn't end with ticker tape victory parades, a major hurricane which knocked out a major city, the worst financial crisis of a generation, a global pandemic, and then an attempted violent coup. A lot of these are self inflicted, sure - but we have survived. And there is honor and joy in doing that, and resilience as well.
Vibes can be off because of the discontinuity - our society has seen major changes wrought - but, well, let's move forward and recognize that despite the culture wars, we got through these things together and we're on the other side of them together.
Yes, but much of the problem stemmed from CDC who did not give individual and local decisionmakers the information they needed to make and defend cost effective NPIs plus not allowing fractional dosing and first dose first protocols when vaccine supply was short. FDA abetted by no allowing cheap and dirty screening text for asymptomatic people that could have facilitated test-to-enter protocols.
Like all analogies it's imperfect, but I once read an essay by Fran Lebowitz about how the vibrant arts culture of 1970s New York was literally killed by AIDS. An entire generation of artists and actors and playwrights and tastemakers were just gone and the ones who came after lost those who should have been their mentors. I'm too young to know but in her opinion it's never recovered.
Addison, no one enjoys and values your thought processes more than I do, but I think you are wrong on this question. According to Bing Copilot the median age of those who died from COVID in the United States, was seventy-eight years old. Thus, the vast majority who died from COVID must have been over sixty-five, past retirement age.
I think the reason that no one passes on information effectively from experienced employees to new hires at Lowe's is that the experienced employees tend to just up and quit when they find a better job. They never have a chance to train their replacement.
I believe that our country has suffered from a form of collective PTSD due to the pandemic. There was a MASS loss of grandparents. Several million still suffer from long covid, which is where the loss in the working age population may be felt. However, collective pain became most acute when inflation broke out, and so that's what we tend to attribute our bad feelings to.
(1) Characteristics of Persons Who Died with COVID-19 — United States .... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e1.htm.
(2) Data Visualization | COVID-19 Deaths by Age - The Heritage Foundation. https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/public-health/covid-19-deaths-by-age/.
(3) Statistics of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_States.
(4) COVID-19 deaths by age U.S. 2023 | Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/.
(5) CDC COVID Data Tracker - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/.
Fair interesting comment!
I was interested in this:
"I think the reason that no one passes on information effectively from experienced employees to new hires at Lowe's is that the experienced employees tend to just up and quit when they find a better job. They never have a chance to train their replacement."
What I've found (personally and recently) is that many experienced employees also leave because they're just plain hitting retirement age and want to retire. And not just at Lowe's! Those experienced employees often want to, and try to, train and hand over to their replacements but often find management won't allow time for that: neither from those wanting to train, nor for those who would benefit from the training.
I 'retired' (it hasn't quite taken) in 2021 and had been trying to train/hand-over some quite specialised knowledge and skills since at least 2017 - but found no management support and no takers once they realised that (a) this was hard; and (b) management wasn't freeing their time for it.
Even now I am officially retired (but back on 'part-time/casual' contract) I'm still trying to hand over: yet still no takers. Some of this stuff is critical to their operations. 'They' must know that: it's why they keep me on contract, and keep assigning me work. As and when I do fully, no-kidding, retire it will leave them with a hole that's difficult to fill. I'm trying to pre-fill it for them but they won't seem to enable that. Go figure.
And poorer service for the same price IS inflation. :)
Beyond death rates, the retirement rate shot up sharply during the pandemic. The most experienced, older workers were more likely to call time on their careers once the pandemic hit - would have been nice to be in this group! You see this most clearly on airplanes, at restaurants, and, yes, at Lowe’s. I’ve personally felt a turning of the tide - a stabilization - in the past year but it is still hit and miss depending on the business. We may not get back to 2019, but it will get better.
Sadly, after 30 years of working, it’s accurate to my experience that one is never adequately shown the ropes for a new job. The first three months are all learning curve, figuring out the parameters of the role. Then you get really good at it and figure out how to do it better and find ways to expand the parameters of the job description, make it your own.
I definitely agree that there's a lot to this, but I'm not sure it's actually "losing 1 million people". That explanation has always seemed too pat to me, and although I'm not a complete cynic, I just think people are more self-absorbed than that. What rings truer is the _disruption_ to daily routines, of which the loss of 1M people was only a marginal contributor.
Zooming out, though... IMO we're simultaneously in the end-stage of the "Bowling Alone" pathology, but also on the cusp of an explosive renaissance of civic life -- the "end of the beginning" of a phase of urban rediscovery and renewal that started with the first generation of gentrifying hipsters back in the 90's.
I suspect there's another component, too: the Cost Disease. You know how before 2008, most cities had already reached their outer practical limits of sprawl (the mythical ~1hr commute), and were just kind of going on this zombie autopilot mode, which abruptly stopped when the financial crisis hit -- at which point the halted sprawl spent the next decade morphing into a general housing crisis?
Well, I wonder if something similar is happening with the Cost Disease via the Housing Theory Of Everything. Like the housing crisis, its core drivers are decades-old, and the Cost Disease was steadily getting worse "on autopilot"... but this one big disruptive event and its attendant inflation spike really revealed the bubble that was there all along.
And so, now we're at a place where the contradictions can't be ignored anymore. Buying a house is finally out of reach for most of the middle class in anywhere but the deep exurbs and dying cities. It used to be that high wages just meant a middle-class family could afford a reasonably prosperous life; now they're merely the result of middle-class families chasing wage increases just to catch up with a reasonably prosperous life. Everyone else's insane housing costs become the prices that no one can afford.
It seems like we've hit all time highs with how polarized the country is. Factor in how easy it is to access guns and the US is a scary place to be right now. But underneath it all, I think the majority is in the center and media just highlights the extremists.
Better urban design would solve so many underlying issues, it's so easy to be a tough guy or a Karen behind a computer screen, but face to face not so much.
I'm not sure if this is related to what you're talking about, especially since I'm a generation ahead of you.
Lowe's is a last resort for me. I'd rather go to the neighborhood hardware store, where they ask what I'm looking for when I walk in and 99% of the time, it's there and they take me right to it. In and out in 5 minutes or less.
Or shopping at the local small chain grocery store, which costs a bit more but doesn't make me tired when I walk in, like a typical Kroger's that has 132,000 square feet I have to traverse to find what I need. And I love to walk, regularly putting in 4-6 miles daily! Just not when I'm shopping.
My neighborhood restaurants are locally owned, often by people who live in the neighborhood. Service is great and I know at least a few of the people who serve me by name.
It's all reminiscent of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, I guess. And that feeling of wanting to shop smaller and more locally intensified for me as a result of the pandemic. The connections fostered by living on a smaller scale matter more to me now than ever.
Agree
I work in the field of employee ownership and one constant is true - proximity to ownership matters.
Large organizations have abstract ownership that diminishes a social pro-accountability groupishness. It is its own form of continuity. The US economy seems to favor consolidation and supply chain integration- efficient for sure.
Effective over the longer term? I don’t think so - it dehumanizes at a time we actually need human passion and connection.
That's awesome to hear! I truly believe that employee owned companies and cooperatives are our best bet going forward. I used to work for an ESOP, and until we got bought, it was one of the best places to work. Which all tanked under the new owners. But even then, at least the folks who got the payout from the buyout were the actual employees. Especially folks that had spent their whole careers there. Honestly, very just.
I don't agree that continuity should be valued in itself, but there are many contexts in which it has instrumental value. The level-of-service in retail is one such example.
At the lower tiers of work, employers assume that "good" employees are interchangeable. Even if these jobs are not high-skill and high-knowledge, they still require skill and knowledge. In retail, the demands for store knowledge grow with the size of the store and with the breadth of the stock and services. This takes time to learn, so retention of sales staff is important. But retailers do not pay for retention. I am sometimes frustrated with customer service, but I remind myself that this is probably a management problem, not a problem of the employee's making.
I have a hack that works at Lowe's and Home Depot. I order an item online for pick up, which means an employee has to find it for you. They send an email when it's ready for pick up, and I just go to a locker with my code. No more Long March through the Big Box. If the item isn't what you hoped for, you can either return it immediately or just not check it out.
Unless it's Walmart, who will delay or substitute your order for an item that's right there on a shelf. Not enough people staffing the pickup orders..?
Yep, Walmart isn't foolproof. I've had a good experience with Lowe's and Home Depot.
I agree that the vibecession is real and the pre-pandemic world might be lost forever. There was a pushfulness that was lost. The world is now as sepia as Mexico in an American movie, people quiet quit, not only their jobs.
But in my recollection, this happened more recently than the worst pandemic pain. And, in my case, it matches the time that I went from diligent saver to snowballing debt.
I didn't lose anyone that was close to the pandemic — no friend or relative died — so my experience may be different than other people. But I remember late 2020 and early to mid 2021 with fondness, as a time of optimism. But then something changed. And to me, that change was also financial.
I love your substack, but I have to be a bit mean here.
You've repeatedly asserted that conservatives were being selfish and un-Christian by advocating for an end to lockdowns and more limited mitigation measures. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were unjustly put out of business by the lockdowns; students' test scores of literacy and numeracy, particularly of poorer ones, plummeted and haven't recovered; mental health issues surged.
"Following the science" should have meant that high-risk people (the old and the sick) ought to isolate and take precautions, but everyone else (who had a near-zero chance of death) should have, within reason, gotten back to the business of civilization. Prolonged lockdowns were the cruel and un-Christian thing to do, and caused an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering. And I do find it galling that lockdown zealots continue to believe that lockdown skeptics were callous and selfish people, when *they* are the ones who inflicted terrible cruelty on vulnerable people just to satisfy their narcissistic neuroticism.
Some of this - much of this - is value judgments/judgment calls. I respect your view. The hyperbole and lack of charity from certain folks (I'm thinking heavily of the stuff First Things published) when I talk about Catholics/conservatives made it harder for me to consider the side they were representing.
I don't think that lack of charity was the main reason for lockdown skepticism. And I had at least two democrat friends admit to me straight out that harsh lockdowns that created an aura of helplessness and apocalyptic chaos was worthwhile to help defeat Donald Trump. So while I'm sure lockdown zealots believed they were on the side of the angels, they had some certifiable demons in their ranks.
We never really had any true lockdowns, though. All we ever had was just a vague assertion of "I dunno, you probably should go out and about too much". At most, there were recommended business closures or restrictions in the first couple months, and even those were pretty loosy-goosy, and often enforced more by the businesses themselves than anything. There was pretty much zero enforcement otherwise. The real malaise was that nobody felt safe because everything we did was so haphazard.
As a counterpoint, look at Australia. They had real, harsh lockdowns whenever the virus was detected in a community. But the key point was that they were hard, but temporary, only usually a few weeks. And while that seems harsh, in truth, it gave folks confidence to actually lead a normal life when restrictions were lifted. Compare that to the 2 years of endless malaise and uncertainty we faced, even when the thin veneer of restrictions was largely lifted early on.
It's worth noting that people already started not going out even before the initial restrictions were put in place. In truth, we locked ourselves down. But because that was untargeted and haphazard, it was ineffective, and quickly created burnout and strife.
Whether it was enforced by the private sector or the government isn't all that germane- most people were forced into social isolation.
The government should have informed people well about their risk levels, and then encouraged people to act accordingly. The majority of liberals in 2021 thought that the mortality rate of covid was more than 50%, when it was 0.3%. Being that badly misinformed probably was a huge factor in people's anger and neuroticism towards reasonable lockdown skeptics.
Look at all the narratives! Everybody's got an explanation, a theory, a bubble in the head. Is that the reason betting sites are flourishing? Also, what's with the backhand slap at Rusty Reno's First Things? That's a hit out of bounds. Cost you fifteen yards.
I think I was somewhat lucky - in December 2019, I got married and honeymooned. By the time I got vaxxed in April 2021, my wife had given birth to our first child, we had moved from a downtown apartment to an old, inner-ring suburban house in a walkable area that we got a great deal on, and I'd switched roles at work from one that required me to go in everyday during the pandemic to one where I could work from home more.
So, I had a lot of related life events all happen while everyone was locked down. And as such, the discontinuity with my pre-pandemic life seems very normal. And even during the pandemic - while I was agitated about going into work in April of 2020, by June I saw it as a blessing in disguise.
That said - and maybe this is easier for me to do - I kinda think we all shouldn't really dwell too much on the pandemic. We all had imperfect information, we all had to make our own choices, and we all had to deal with people we thought were too rigid and other we thought were too unconcerned. All of us had bad pandemic takes. And, despite a national leader who was uniquely terrible at uniting us - we did all make it through.
Sure, society was tested and stretched, as were all of us. And everybody lost somebody at that time. BUT! Our society is far more resilient than we think. It so far has survived this century - a major domestic attack on our largest city, two unpopular wars that didn't end with ticker tape victory parades, a major hurricane which knocked out a major city, the worst financial crisis of a generation, a global pandemic, and then an attempted violent coup. A lot of these are self inflicted, sure - but we have survived. And there is honor and joy in doing that, and resilience as well.
Vibes can be off because of the discontinuity - our society has seen major changes wrought - but, well, let's move forward and recognize that despite the culture wars, we got through these things together and we're on the other side of them together.
Yes, but much of the problem stemmed from CDC who did not give individual and local decisionmakers the information they needed to make and defend cost effective NPIs plus not allowing fractional dosing and first dose first protocols when vaccine supply was short. FDA abetted by no allowing cheap and dirty screening text for asymptomatic people that could have facilitated test-to-enter protocols.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/covid-policy-errors
Like all analogies it's imperfect, but I once read an essay by Fran Lebowitz about how the vibrant arts culture of 1970s New York was literally killed by AIDS. An entire generation of artists and actors and playwrights and tastemakers were just gone and the ones who came after lost those who should have been their mentors. I'm too young to know but in her opinion it's never recovered.