Thank you for this. One of the things that the pandemic made clear to me is that a lot of people don't understand that sometimes things change and you never get your old life back again. You make a good argument that it's exactly that lack of understanding, combined with flailing around looking for an explanation, that explains a lot about where we find ourselves right now.
Great questions, great discussion. My background is in policy analysis and my partner kept bringing up how this policy or that policy wasn’t the right one. And my response was always
a) government has to act. That’s its function;
b) action under emergency conditions is never optimal; and
c) there needs to be discussion of what the government’s role should be and what the responsibilities of citizenship are.
I never thought that ever happened. There was instant politicization of issues, then a lot of rage, then some gradual fallout…but I’m still waiting on the comparative policy papers (I’ve read a few, they’re too limited) and the larger national discussion of the overarching social contract here. Because there’s no question that government has a role and that citizens have responsibilities.
There's also little doubt that acting like wearing a mask is the world's greatest hardship wasn't the right way to go. But I don't think government suppression of dissent (misinformation/disinformation) was necessarily the right way to go either – it stoked a lot of paranoia. In my opinion, there needed to be WAY more communication, way more coordination. And that discussion should be held at a national level and disseminated via the education system, which is where we cultivate civic values.
To me, that feels like what you’re taking up here.
In the minds of the policy analysts and the journalists and the civil bureaucracy, it has a mandate to act. But leaders have the option to say “the proper role of my level of government in this situation is nothing, we have no input here, citizens are free to live their lives according to their communal standards and conscious”. That is a perfectly valid and legitimate response, and far, far more public servants should have had the courage to take that position. I would argue that a propensity toward action, a default assumption that “Government should do Something” is the exact wrong attitude and is the very source of all the problems with our COVID response.
No, sorry, the government is assigned responsibility for public health. That’s its function and it has always assumed it. It has always acted in pandemics.
All very convenient to make the claim that it doesn’t have to act in the case of a pandemic, but how about a nuclear weapons attack? Does government not need to act to contain the fallout? Is that optional, too?
My point is that history and framework matter here. Like it or not, this is how our governance is set up. If you’d like to drastically alter it, well, hold out for a time machine back to the Wild West or start your own political party. Good luck.
This is so poignant. The loss of faith in one another, the loss of that feeling that most decent people would look out for one another, would be willing to endure minor inconveniences for the sake of those who couldn’t return to a pre-pandemic normal for reasons they had no control over. The weakest among us were viewed as not worthy of consideration by so many. There is a mostly unacknowledged grieving taking place. We aren’t talking about it.
Having worked at a leading school of public health during Covid, I think you underestimate the extent to which lockdowns really were, or at least became, an "authoritarian scheme" that had been waiting for the right crisis. Of course it was a fluid situation and public health leaders deserve some grace for the first few weeks or months, but eventually lockdowns became a cynical cudgel opportunistically exploited to punish political enemies and pursue longstanding policy goals that had nothing to do with the novel coronavirus. Part of the vibes "not being the same" ever since is that so much of the governing class so eagerly betrayed their constituents and there's little reason to believe they're not itching to do it again. https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/mission-creep
The author is convinced that people like me simply didn’t care about people dying from Covid. The truth of the matter is that it quickly became apparent to some of us that the lethality of the virus was dramatically overstated and that governments were using the pandemic for all sorts of power grabs and political ends.
It was overstated because nobody was quite sure how bad it was at first and it was better to err on the side of caution. Like how broad tornado warnings are applied, even before a tornado is confirmed.
And even then, it still took a million people in America alone. If you think that's acceptable, that's incredibly callous. And it doesn't bode well for America's ability to handle future crises.
Well...it was understood pretty early in the pandemic that the lethality was stratified, and if you were young then the risk could perhaps feel overstated. If you were me, at the other end of the age spectrum, a lot more serious. aBut the other thing understood very early on was that SARS-CoV2 was amazingly infectious. Those infected 20somethings might not die, but they could infect parents and grandparents or the older people encountering them in the gas station. Callous indifference to others or lack of understanding?
Also, "quickly became apparent" seems to indicate making a conclusion in the midst of a rapidly evolving situation. Early on many rural areas probably didn't see many - or any - COVID cases. All the precautions probably seemed unnecessary, or like government overreach if you had a conspiratorial mindset. That situation changed fairly quickly because highly-infectious airborne virus, but if you made up your mind in that low-key moment in time you probably reached a wrong conclusion.
And of course all this was happening as a highly-contested presidential campaign season was developing. Responses got politicized almost immediately....
As I suggested previously, the public health leadership does deserve some grace for some amount of the time that they were navigating an unknowable situation, but "erring on the side of caution" needed to also include erring on the side of caution and being open to course correction over concerns like learning loss in school, deaths of addiction, loneliness, etc. instead of vilifying and cancelling critics and skeptics. When people were losing their jobs a year and a half later over refusing a rushed vax not even particularly effective against what had by then become the leading variants, that was not about science or caution but abuse of power to punish political and cultural enemies.
The notion that "if you think a million deaths in America is acceptable, that's incredibly callous" (paraphrasing) implicitly assumes that we had it in our power to make that number much lower in the fight against an extremely contagious airborne disease. All policy is a matter of trade-offs and locking down even harder would have increased marginal deaths from missed surgeries, domestic violence, etc. To have criticized the lockdown regime early on does not necessarily mean one simply callously wanted more people to die. I agree that the whole era does not bode well for America's ability to handle future crises, and that some of that is due to people not taking Covid seriously enough, but a big part was also the politicized and abuse way the governing class "didn't let the crisis go to waste."
One lesson of this pandemic ought to be just how much the intangibles matter in a pandemic situation. Lack of human contact, missed health care sessions, loss of community weren't really considered in the public health responses and they should be. I leave out the remote learning debacle because I still don't have a better answer. Given the lack of facility safeguards AND personal protective gear I don't think teachers were wrong to feel that being in the classroom with children was a danger. At least where I live parents seemed to feel the same way.
You seem to take offense at the implication that "a million deaths in America" seems acceptable to you. I can understand, but I think they have a point. Deaths from COVID were drastically reduced in other countries - South Korea, New Zealand - so plainly it could be done. Or were you saying that we Americans didn't have it in our power to make the number much lower? Again, I'd argue about "didn't have it" vs. wouldn't use it.
The problem with complaining about the politicized and abusive way the governing class operated is that the responses go both directions. You probably think of the extreme (and sometimes contrary) measures on places like California; I think of the (to me) deranged head-in-the-sand approach in Texas or Florida. To me that What-me-worry response by Greg Abbott or Ron Desantis was the more overtly politicized, since the California responses were closer to standard Infectious disease measures. I get that you feel the public health community has become overly politicized, but there is a long science behind their recommendations. However, I will stipulate that the infectious disease science does not take into account those intangibles noted up above. For a public health response that is a problem.
Enough satellite-view comments. We survived this pandemic - sort of. I'm interested in your specific ideas for things we could do better for the next one. Or before the next one...
I was not against stringent measures to protect the most vulnerable in targeted fashion. My father was dying in a nursing home at the time and I could only talk to him through a window slightly ajar, and I didn't object because it was justifiable to protect the sick elderly people there even though he'd personally survived Covid. Vaccine mandates to keep one's job or eat at a restaurant though, especially long after the worst variants of Covid had been eclipsed by new less dangerous ones, were more heavy-handed symbolic intimidation than thoughtful public health leadership.
Something that would have been more useful than masking and social distancing--and without the opportunities for scapegoating those behaviors involve--would be retrofitting air filtration systems in schools and other tight public spaces. Definitely worth investing in such technical solutions over time, as opposed to the more ideological conventional wisdom of much of the public health field. As I mentioned in the piece linked above (https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/mission-creep) public health historically started off as a pretty rigorous set of disciplines based in medicine and engineering but over the past 50 or 60 years has become more and more a shallower advocacy area laundering political activism in the guise of STEM. It's not clear to me what would be the best way to proceed--it's one thing to work to restore the prestige and credibility of public health institutions, it's another to make those places actually deserve the deference they desire.
Yeah, my father-in-law died that year as well. We didn't know he was dying, but I think, in retrospect, he was more bothered by the isolation of COVID lockdown at his assisted-living facility than we realized until very late. By then it was too late. I feel your loss.
I'm with you on the technical solutions like HEPA filters, air handling systems, virus-killing UV lights. That would be one way for schools, churches, other public buildings to minimize virus transmission without need for masks. Another institutional move should be the stockpiling of N95 masks and other PPE so we have some when they're needed. It just killed me that my wife could sew masks probably more effective than those available in stores for much of the pandemic. These are things you'd have to spend money on in advance; in the middle of a pandemic is too late. But then money for a lot of public health matters has not been available for probably the past 15 years. If COVID is a reminder of what can happen when you don't care about these things then some good came of the pandemic.
Vaccine mandates to keep one's job? I suppose the logic depends on the job. Anyway, if a company, including a health care company, wants to mandate vaccination as a condition of employment I don't see that government has reason to intervene. Or if it does have grounds then there are a lot of other conditions of employment that should be up for discussion. And If you want to have a vaccine mandate to eat at your restaurant, fine. If it ends up nuking your business it's on you. Make the business decision and accept the consequences. My sense is that in 2021, 2022 this was worth more discussion. In 2024 I think anyone who's interested in being vaccinated has been, to the extent that vaccine mandates just complicate the employee search.
I didn't work in public health, and the people I know who do (or did) were all on the science (microbiologists, virologists) or epidemiology side. Perhaps that's why I missed this turn toward advocacy. Or perhaps I'm not thinking of the advocacy I have observed as political activism. I do recognize that as medical and engineering solutions reduced deaths from infectious diseases, causes of death increasingly became....let's say self-inflicted. Cardiac and circulatory disease, diabetes. obesity, et. al. Considering just the expense of treatment for these and related conditions, they fit my definition of a public health issue, and one most obviously solved by changing people's behavior. Is that political activism? I guess I need specific examples to know if we're talking about the same thing.
After the absolute combined horrors of WW1 and the great influenza pandemic came the roaring twenties. It was hardly an accident that the atmosphere was a muddle of survivors’ guilt, relief, and ‘party now’!
What isn’t often talked about is that 2 years after the deaths of over 80-100 million people worldwide, discussion of the pandemic was non-existent. Unlike the war casualties (which could be romanticized and which were tiny by comparison), people processed influenza by silence.
My first patient in medical school was in her teens in Philadelphia in 1918 and told me that in one night the entire family in the brownstone adjacent to her died. She probably hadn’t told that to anyone in many, many decades.
Death by infectious disease always feels in some way inexplicable….as does the many ways of coping, some of which are soberingly inhuman.
I have read (a book about the 1918 pandemic) that one reason nobody spoke much about those years in the decades following was not only the trauma itself of so much death and illness, but that many people, looking back after it was over, were ashamed of their behavior during the crisis. I believe the same thing is happening now.
It really convicted me: beginning in late fall of 2020, when I read that theory, and after some horrific online encounters with raging friends, family, or acquaintances, I resolved to at least try to not say, type, or do things that I would be ashamed of later.
During the pandemic I re-read a book I had enjoyed in the early 2000s, which happened to have a plague as a plot point. This quote LEAPED off the page at me in 2020:
“Most disasters are fast, and big. You can see everyone else’s life got overturned when yours did. Houses are smashed, livestock’s dead. But plagues isolate people. They shut themselves inside while disease takes a life at a time, day after day. It adds up. Whole cities break under the load of what was lost. People stop trusting each other, because you don’t know who’s sick.”
Everyone's life changes, but not at the same time. And the best way to be "safe" is to stop trusting anyone else. It's hard to rebuild that trust, afterward.
I remember some the conservative Catholics making an argument along the lines of "The public health experts' view of the pandemic must be wrong, because it forces us to distrust each other and see fellow people as threats to our health." The problem that they didn't want to acknowledge is that that is the nature of a communicable disease. 90 percent of the anti-doing-anything commentary was just refusing or not be able to come to terms with the nature of an infectious disease outbreak.
One perk of fast food getting so expensive is that it’s a lot easier to convince my friends to dine out downtown with me. Would you rather spend $15 downtown on some good food, or $13+ on a Chipotle bowl? I’m a very big solo dining enthusiast, but it is nice having somebody come with me 😂
"half the country didn't and wouldn't undergo the slightest inconvenience to save your life". So profound and poignant. It will stay with me for a long time
I really appreciate your article. It makes so much sense and puts into words some of the feelings that I have had over the years. Why would anyone not expect there to be inflation? Supply chain issues, higher wages, inability to find workers. In addition, the loss of life, I think we also lost common sense and humanity.
“…the people staffing factories and medical offices and stores, the managers who died or retired, and took decades of canny, grounded experience with them that can never be exactly replicated”. This may turn out to be one of the greatest impacts of the pandemic years. One generation of workers was always going to retire and take their institutional knowledge with them, but the acceleration of what should have been a gradual replacement process, along with widespread career-changing and geographic relocation, has resulted in a noticeable decline in quality and “customer satisfaction” in numerous professions and industries.
This blip in the talent-supply chain will have far reaching consequences. For example, there are about a million fewer people in the construction trades than there were before the housing bubble recession, and the most direct solution to our housing shortage - building more houses and the infrastructure to serve them - will be harder to achieve without those “decades of canny, grounded experience.” Slower service at restaurants and retail stores is a minor annoyance. Ongoing inflated home prices are at the heart of economic malaise.
The sheer amount of disregard and callousness towards the pandemic by folks on the right and sadly by religious people have me a somewhat odd crisis in faith, not least because I lost my grandparents as a result. But it wasn't my faith in God that eroded, or even in the Church, who responded overall very reasonably, or as well as anyone could (for a 2000 year old institution, it's hardly their first pandemic, after all). No, it was my faith in the laity that was really hurt. Holier-than-thou folks who wouldn't bother with even small inconveniences to try and save someone, and who even glorified their actions as some sort of example of faith. To say nothing of the decent into conspiracy theories. Even today there's a young adult group I visited here even in IL who refer themselves as "Pure Bloods" because their not vaccinated. Is it any surprise to see religion dropping off a cliff for young people when they see how religious people, who should be so selfless and caring, acted during the biggest crisis younger folks have ever known?
Long story short, there's something really very wrong with American Christianity, to my mind. And I fear its going to get worse before it gets better. It's almost getting embarrassing to be associated with anymore, not for the tenants of the faith, but for how warped they've become in the public perception, especially by the faithful themselves. I'm still sticking through to try and change that, but it can be very hard and lonely.
On a final note, in terms of pandemic response, I think Australia did the best overall. When they saw cases occurring in a town, they would do a targeted hard lock down there for about two weeks, until cases went away. Then they would open fully back up. Despite the more draconian measures, they ended up having a far more normal experience because of it, since folks had confidence to return to their normal lives afterward, since they knew the virus wasn't active there and had been taken care of. Compare that to the nearly 2 years of constant malaise here. It wasn't really the barely enforced lockdowns that tied our hands, it was really the constant uncertainty of what to do.
Well written as always. I'll add in - my own vibes observation is an increase in relatively small-level disorder that has the ability to scale into larger level disorder. Fairfax County has noted large increases in shoplifting, both organized by groups, and in other times of opportunity. You've written about supermarkets trying to take this on, but the flipside is, are we OK with police de-prioritizing it so much that it just becomes normalized? I'm not satisfied with the answer being there's just not enough resources to go around. The second is a marked decrease in traffic-rules enforcement. After spending the last year teaching my teenager how to drive, the state of our roads policing is not very encouraging.
I find when addressing people’s concerns about high prices is to put things into context, as you’ve done with your article. For me, after looking at my family of three’s $900 a month grocery bill with a little shock, I realized that it actually amounted to just $10 a day per person to eat what everyone wanted, from steak to specialty yogurts, even bacon. 😁 Not bad. Context is everything.
I have found the backlash against the lockdowns utterly disheartening in terms of being able to have any confidence whatsoever in the public's ability to process even semi-complicated logic. The argument seems to be that since lockdowns were no longer needed by the spring of 2021, it follows that they were also bad policy in the spring of 2020. But the whole reason we didn't need them anymore by the spring of 2021 was because the policies we adopted in the spring of 2020 were fairly successful, giving us time to vaccinate people and see the virus mutate into less fatal strains. (Some people take this argument to an even dumber extreme and actually believe we never needed the vaccine, because the virus all but disappeared - by pure coincidence - right around the time people started taking vaccines...)
That doesn't excuse some of the stupidity we also saw at the time, like the protest free-for-alls you mention or Gretchen Whitmer's leaving big box stores open but putting ropes around the seeds because we can't have people gardening in their own yards for some reason. But in the most general terms it should be obvious that public health benefits were going to require some costly economic tradeoffs.
Those tradeoffs didn't *have* to lead to rampant inflation, though. We didn't have to make the money printers go brrrr. That was a choice by politicians who thought it was possible to build a Potemkin economy in which all the money moves around the same way as if everyone were doing what they were doing before, even with half the country no longer doing what they were doing before. There is no way that was going to be sustainable and everybody who knew anything warned at the time that the inflation hangover would be massive. This is on Trump and Biden equally, so it's not a partisan issue.
The vibe that changed for me was a complete breakdown in any trust I had in any institution that I had believed in my whole life. An example from here in NYC: in the spring of 2020, my local TV news anchor reported that the death toll in NY from COVID had reached 10,000. The day before it had been something like 6,000, so she offered an explanation: several thousand recent deaths were now being attributed to COVID, even though those patients had not been tested or treated for COVID, but their deaths were now being blamed on the virus. In other words, the media needed a scary headline, so they admitted they were making things up just to keep us scared. How could I ever trust the news again, when they tell us they are lying to our faces?
A bigger part of the vibe shift comes from the complete absence of anyone facing any consequences for any of their obviously bad decisions during the COVID times. How many politicians lost their jobs because of the bad way they handled restrictions? Gretchen Whitmer got re-elected, as did Justin Trudeau. The politician in California responsible for overlooking billions in taxpayer funded COVID relief fraud? He got a cabinet position out of it. With no one admitting they made mistakes and no one suffering any consequences, how can the average person not feel a (negative) vibe shift?
The institutions we believed in lied to us, over and over; the media, medical professionals, academia. There's no one to trust anymore: we're on our own. And there's no justice: millions of us lost our jobs and our financial security, and no one will take responsibility or even apologize. Yes, there's a vibe shift, and it's a very, very dark one.
I like this metaphor with the sand: many people changed countless small habits and beliefs during covid, for one to two years. People changed their beliefs because their expectations were violated. They adjusted/adapted (or didn’t). This distorted our cultural frameworks for explaining and understanding reality.
(I’d add this compounded an already-shaken epistemological crisis)
All the particulars changed, and reconfigured the map. So, many social-perceptual changes makes sense. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
Four years later, I still can’t find them, let alone the xmas ones that I loved the most. Apparently the sugar they used to make the cores of them was hit hard by the supply chain snarls, and never returned.
Thank you for this. One of the things that the pandemic made clear to me is that a lot of people don't understand that sometimes things change and you never get your old life back again. You make a good argument that it's exactly that lack of understanding, combined with flailing around looking for an explanation, that explains a lot about where we find ourselves right now.
Great questions, great discussion. My background is in policy analysis and my partner kept bringing up how this policy or that policy wasn’t the right one. And my response was always
a) government has to act. That’s its function;
b) action under emergency conditions is never optimal; and
c) there needs to be discussion of what the government’s role should be and what the responsibilities of citizenship are.
I never thought that ever happened. There was instant politicization of issues, then a lot of rage, then some gradual fallout…but I’m still waiting on the comparative policy papers (I’ve read a few, they’re too limited) and the larger national discussion of the overarching social contract here. Because there’s no question that government has a role and that citizens have responsibilities.
There's also little doubt that acting like wearing a mask is the world's greatest hardship wasn't the right way to go. But I don't think government suppression of dissent (misinformation/disinformation) was necessarily the right way to go either – it stoked a lot of paranoia. In my opinion, there needed to be WAY more communication, way more coordination. And that discussion should be held at a national level and disseminated via the education system, which is where we cultivate civic values.
To me, that feels like what you’re taking up here.
Nice comment!
sorry, I'm a chronic editor...my comments change after posting :)
“Government has to act”.
No it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to act.
In the minds of the policy analysts and the journalists and the civil bureaucracy, it has a mandate to act. But leaders have the option to say “the proper role of my level of government in this situation is nothing, we have no input here, citizens are free to live their lives according to their communal standards and conscious”. That is a perfectly valid and legitimate response, and far, far more public servants should have had the courage to take that position. I would argue that a propensity toward action, a default assumption that “Government should do Something” is the exact wrong attitude and is the very source of all the problems with our COVID response.
No, sorry, the government is assigned responsibility for public health. That’s its function and it has always assumed it. It has always acted in pandemics.
All very convenient to make the claim that it doesn’t have to act in the case of a pandemic, but how about a nuclear weapons attack? Does government not need to act to contain the fallout? Is that optional, too?
My point is that history and framework matter here. Like it or not, this is how our governance is set up. If you’d like to drastically alter it, well, hold out for a time machine back to the Wild West or start your own political party. Good luck.
This is so poignant. The loss of faith in one another, the loss of that feeling that most decent people would look out for one another, would be willing to endure minor inconveniences for the sake of those who couldn’t return to a pre-pandemic normal for reasons they had no control over. The weakest among us were viewed as not worthy of consideration by so many. There is a mostly unacknowledged grieving taking place. We aren’t talking about it.
Having worked at a leading school of public health during Covid, I think you underestimate the extent to which lockdowns really were, or at least became, an "authoritarian scheme" that had been waiting for the right crisis. Of course it was a fluid situation and public health leaders deserve some grace for the first few weeks or months, but eventually lockdowns became a cynical cudgel opportunistically exploited to punish political enemies and pursue longstanding policy goals that had nothing to do with the novel coronavirus. Part of the vibes "not being the same" ever since is that so much of the governing class so eagerly betrayed their constituents and there's little reason to believe they're not itching to do it again. https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/mission-creep
The author is convinced that people like me simply didn’t care about people dying from Covid. The truth of the matter is that it quickly became apparent to some of us that the lethality of the virus was dramatically overstated and that governments were using the pandemic for all sorts of power grabs and political ends.
It was overstated because nobody was quite sure how bad it was at first and it was better to err on the side of caution. Like how broad tornado warnings are applied, even before a tornado is confirmed.
And even then, it still took a million people in America alone. If you think that's acceptable, that's incredibly callous. And it doesn't bode well for America's ability to handle future crises.
Well...it was understood pretty early in the pandemic that the lethality was stratified, and if you were young then the risk could perhaps feel overstated. If you were me, at the other end of the age spectrum, a lot more serious. aBut the other thing understood very early on was that SARS-CoV2 was amazingly infectious. Those infected 20somethings might not die, but they could infect parents and grandparents or the older people encountering them in the gas station. Callous indifference to others or lack of understanding?
Also, "quickly became apparent" seems to indicate making a conclusion in the midst of a rapidly evolving situation. Early on many rural areas probably didn't see many - or any - COVID cases. All the precautions probably seemed unnecessary, or like government overreach if you had a conspiratorial mindset. That situation changed fairly quickly because highly-infectious airborne virus, but if you made up your mind in that low-key moment in time you probably reached a wrong conclusion.
And of course all this was happening as a highly-contested presidential campaign season was developing. Responses got politicized almost immediately....
As I suggested previously, the public health leadership does deserve some grace for some amount of the time that they were navigating an unknowable situation, but "erring on the side of caution" needed to also include erring on the side of caution and being open to course correction over concerns like learning loss in school, deaths of addiction, loneliness, etc. instead of vilifying and cancelling critics and skeptics. When people were losing their jobs a year and a half later over refusing a rushed vax not even particularly effective against what had by then become the leading variants, that was not about science or caution but abuse of power to punish political and cultural enemies.
The notion that "if you think a million deaths in America is acceptable, that's incredibly callous" (paraphrasing) implicitly assumes that we had it in our power to make that number much lower in the fight against an extremely contagious airborne disease. All policy is a matter of trade-offs and locking down even harder would have increased marginal deaths from missed surgeries, domestic violence, etc. To have criticized the lockdown regime early on does not necessarily mean one simply callously wanted more people to die. I agree that the whole era does not bode well for America's ability to handle future crises, and that some of that is due to people not taking Covid seriously enough, but a big part was also the politicized and abuse way the governing class "didn't let the crisis go to waste."
One lesson of this pandemic ought to be just how much the intangibles matter in a pandemic situation. Lack of human contact, missed health care sessions, loss of community weren't really considered in the public health responses and they should be. I leave out the remote learning debacle because I still don't have a better answer. Given the lack of facility safeguards AND personal protective gear I don't think teachers were wrong to feel that being in the classroom with children was a danger. At least where I live parents seemed to feel the same way.
You seem to take offense at the implication that "a million deaths in America" seems acceptable to you. I can understand, but I think they have a point. Deaths from COVID were drastically reduced in other countries - South Korea, New Zealand - so plainly it could be done. Or were you saying that we Americans didn't have it in our power to make the number much lower? Again, I'd argue about "didn't have it" vs. wouldn't use it.
The problem with complaining about the politicized and abusive way the governing class operated is that the responses go both directions. You probably think of the extreme (and sometimes contrary) measures on places like California; I think of the (to me) deranged head-in-the-sand approach in Texas or Florida. To me that What-me-worry response by Greg Abbott or Ron Desantis was the more overtly politicized, since the California responses were closer to standard Infectious disease measures. I get that you feel the public health community has become overly politicized, but there is a long science behind their recommendations. However, I will stipulate that the infectious disease science does not take into account those intangibles noted up above. For a public health response that is a problem.
Enough satellite-view comments. We survived this pandemic - sort of. I'm interested in your specific ideas for things we could do better for the next one. Or before the next one...
I was not against stringent measures to protect the most vulnerable in targeted fashion. My father was dying in a nursing home at the time and I could only talk to him through a window slightly ajar, and I didn't object because it was justifiable to protect the sick elderly people there even though he'd personally survived Covid. Vaccine mandates to keep one's job or eat at a restaurant though, especially long after the worst variants of Covid had been eclipsed by new less dangerous ones, were more heavy-handed symbolic intimidation than thoughtful public health leadership.
Something that would have been more useful than masking and social distancing--and without the opportunities for scapegoating those behaviors involve--would be retrofitting air filtration systems in schools and other tight public spaces. Definitely worth investing in such technical solutions over time, as opposed to the more ideological conventional wisdom of much of the public health field. As I mentioned in the piece linked above (https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/mission-creep) public health historically started off as a pretty rigorous set of disciplines based in medicine and engineering but over the past 50 or 60 years has become more and more a shallower advocacy area laundering political activism in the guise of STEM. It's not clear to me what would be the best way to proceed--it's one thing to work to restore the prestige and credibility of public health institutions, it's another to make those places actually deserve the deference they desire.
Yeah, my father-in-law died that year as well. We didn't know he was dying, but I think, in retrospect, he was more bothered by the isolation of COVID lockdown at his assisted-living facility than we realized until very late. By then it was too late. I feel your loss.
I'm with you on the technical solutions like HEPA filters, air handling systems, virus-killing UV lights. That would be one way for schools, churches, other public buildings to minimize virus transmission without need for masks. Another institutional move should be the stockpiling of N95 masks and other PPE so we have some when they're needed. It just killed me that my wife could sew masks probably more effective than those available in stores for much of the pandemic. These are things you'd have to spend money on in advance; in the middle of a pandemic is too late. But then money for a lot of public health matters has not been available for probably the past 15 years. If COVID is a reminder of what can happen when you don't care about these things then some good came of the pandemic.
Vaccine mandates to keep one's job? I suppose the logic depends on the job. Anyway, if a company, including a health care company, wants to mandate vaccination as a condition of employment I don't see that government has reason to intervene. Or if it does have grounds then there are a lot of other conditions of employment that should be up for discussion. And If you want to have a vaccine mandate to eat at your restaurant, fine. If it ends up nuking your business it's on you. Make the business decision and accept the consequences. My sense is that in 2021, 2022 this was worth more discussion. In 2024 I think anyone who's interested in being vaccinated has been, to the extent that vaccine mandates just complicate the employee search.
I didn't work in public health, and the people I know who do (or did) were all on the science (microbiologists, virologists) or epidemiology side. Perhaps that's why I missed this turn toward advocacy. Or perhaps I'm not thinking of the advocacy I have observed as political activism. I do recognize that as medical and engineering solutions reduced deaths from infectious diseases, causes of death increasingly became....let's say self-inflicted. Cardiac and circulatory disease, diabetes. obesity, et. al. Considering just the expense of treatment for these and related conditions, they fit my definition of a public health issue, and one most obviously solved by changing people's behavior. Is that political activism? I guess I need specific examples to know if we're talking about the same thing.
After the absolute combined horrors of WW1 and the great influenza pandemic came the roaring twenties. It was hardly an accident that the atmosphere was a muddle of survivors’ guilt, relief, and ‘party now’!
What isn’t often talked about is that 2 years after the deaths of over 80-100 million people worldwide, discussion of the pandemic was non-existent. Unlike the war casualties (which could be romanticized and which were tiny by comparison), people processed influenza by silence.
My first patient in medical school was in her teens in Philadelphia in 1918 and told me that in one night the entire family in the brownstone adjacent to her died. She probably hadn’t told that to anyone in many, many decades.
Death by infectious disease always feels in some way inexplicable….as does the many ways of coping, some of which are soberingly inhuman.
I have read (a book about the 1918 pandemic) that one reason nobody spoke much about those years in the decades following was not only the trauma itself of so much death and illness, but that many people, looking back after it was over, were ashamed of their behavior during the crisis. I believe the same thing is happening now.
It really convicted me: beginning in late fall of 2020, when I read that theory, and after some horrific online encounters with raging friends, family, or acquaintances, I resolved to at least try to not say, type, or do things that I would be ashamed of later.
During the pandemic I re-read a book I had enjoyed in the early 2000s, which happened to have a plague as a plot point. This quote LEAPED off the page at me in 2020:
“Most disasters are fast, and big. You can see everyone else’s life got overturned when yours did. Houses are smashed, livestock’s dead. But plagues isolate people. They shut themselves inside while disease takes a life at a time, day after day. It adds up. Whole cities break under the load of what was lost. People stop trusting each other, because you don’t know who’s sick.”
Everyone's life changes, but not at the same time. And the best way to be "safe" is to stop trusting anyone else. It's hard to rebuild that trust, afterward.
I remember some the conservative Catholics making an argument along the lines of "The public health experts' view of the pandemic must be wrong, because it forces us to distrust each other and see fellow people as threats to our health." The problem that they didn't want to acknowledge is that that is the nature of a communicable disease. 90 percent of the anti-doing-anything commentary was just refusing or not be able to come to terms with the nature of an infectious disease outbreak.
One perk of fast food getting so expensive is that it’s a lot easier to convince my friends to dine out downtown with me. Would you rather spend $15 downtown on some good food, or $13+ on a Chipotle bowl? I’m a very big solo dining enthusiast, but it is nice having somebody come with me 😂
"half the country didn't and wouldn't undergo the slightest inconvenience to save your life". So profound and poignant. It will stay with me for a long time
I really appreciate your article. It makes so much sense and puts into words some of the feelings that I have had over the years. Why would anyone not expect there to be inflation? Supply chain issues, higher wages, inability to find workers. In addition, the loss of life, I think we also lost common sense and humanity.
Thank you! A thoughtful and insightful piece. You lay clear the realities of our present discomfort.
Thank you!
“…the people staffing factories and medical offices and stores, the managers who died or retired, and took decades of canny, grounded experience with them that can never be exactly replicated”. This may turn out to be one of the greatest impacts of the pandemic years. One generation of workers was always going to retire and take their institutional knowledge with them, but the acceleration of what should have been a gradual replacement process, along with widespread career-changing and geographic relocation, has resulted in a noticeable decline in quality and “customer satisfaction” in numerous professions and industries.
This blip in the talent-supply chain will have far reaching consequences. For example, there are about a million fewer people in the construction trades than there were before the housing bubble recession, and the most direct solution to our housing shortage - building more houses and the infrastructure to serve them - will be harder to achieve without those “decades of canny, grounded experience.” Slower service at restaurants and retail stores is a minor annoyance. Ongoing inflated home prices are at the heart of economic malaise.
This is definitely something that hit me a lot.
The sheer amount of disregard and callousness towards the pandemic by folks on the right and sadly by religious people have me a somewhat odd crisis in faith, not least because I lost my grandparents as a result. But it wasn't my faith in God that eroded, or even in the Church, who responded overall very reasonably, or as well as anyone could (for a 2000 year old institution, it's hardly their first pandemic, after all). No, it was my faith in the laity that was really hurt. Holier-than-thou folks who wouldn't bother with even small inconveniences to try and save someone, and who even glorified their actions as some sort of example of faith. To say nothing of the decent into conspiracy theories. Even today there's a young adult group I visited here even in IL who refer themselves as "Pure Bloods" because their not vaccinated. Is it any surprise to see religion dropping off a cliff for young people when they see how religious people, who should be so selfless and caring, acted during the biggest crisis younger folks have ever known?
Long story short, there's something really very wrong with American Christianity, to my mind. And I fear its going to get worse before it gets better. It's almost getting embarrassing to be associated with anymore, not for the tenants of the faith, but for how warped they've become in the public perception, especially by the faithful themselves. I'm still sticking through to try and change that, but it can be very hard and lonely.
On a final note, in terms of pandemic response, I think Australia did the best overall. When they saw cases occurring in a town, they would do a targeted hard lock down there for about two weeks, until cases went away. Then they would open fully back up. Despite the more draconian measures, they ended up having a far more normal experience because of it, since folks had confidence to return to their normal lives afterward, since they knew the virus wasn't active there and had been taken care of. Compare that to the nearly 2 years of constant malaise here. It wasn't really the barely enforced lockdowns that tied our hands, it was really the constant uncertainty of what to do.
Well written as always. I'll add in - my own vibes observation is an increase in relatively small-level disorder that has the ability to scale into larger level disorder. Fairfax County has noted large increases in shoplifting, both organized by groups, and in other times of opportunity. You've written about supermarkets trying to take this on, but the flipside is, are we OK with police de-prioritizing it so much that it just becomes normalized? I'm not satisfied with the answer being there's just not enough resources to go around. The second is a marked decrease in traffic-rules enforcement. After spending the last year teaching my teenager how to drive, the state of our roads policing is not very encouraging.
I find when addressing people’s concerns about high prices is to put things into context, as you’ve done with your article. For me, after looking at my family of three’s $900 a month grocery bill with a little shock, I realized that it actually amounted to just $10 a day per person to eat what everyone wanted, from steak to specialty yogurts, even bacon. 😁 Not bad. Context is everything.
I have found the backlash against the lockdowns utterly disheartening in terms of being able to have any confidence whatsoever in the public's ability to process even semi-complicated logic. The argument seems to be that since lockdowns were no longer needed by the spring of 2021, it follows that they were also bad policy in the spring of 2020. But the whole reason we didn't need them anymore by the spring of 2021 was because the policies we adopted in the spring of 2020 were fairly successful, giving us time to vaccinate people and see the virus mutate into less fatal strains. (Some people take this argument to an even dumber extreme and actually believe we never needed the vaccine, because the virus all but disappeared - by pure coincidence - right around the time people started taking vaccines...)
That doesn't excuse some of the stupidity we also saw at the time, like the protest free-for-alls you mention or Gretchen Whitmer's leaving big box stores open but putting ropes around the seeds because we can't have people gardening in their own yards for some reason. But in the most general terms it should be obvious that public health benefits were going to require some costly economic tradeoffs.
Those tradeoffs didn't *have* to lead to rampant inflation, though. We didn't have to make the money printers go brrrr. That was a choice by politicians who thought it was possible to build a Potemkin economy in which all the money moves around the same way as if everyone were doing what they were doing before, even with half the country no longer doing what they were doing before. There is no way that was going to be sustainable and everybody who knew anything warned at the time that the inflation hangover would be massive. This is on Trump and Biden equally, so it's not a partisan issue.
The vibe that changed for me was a complete breakdown in any trust I had in any institution that I had believed in my whole life. An example from here in NYC: in the spring of 2020, my local TV news anchor reported that the death toll in NY from COVID had reached 10,000. The day before it had been something like 6,000, so she offered an explanation: several thousand recent deaths were now being attributed to COVID, even though those patients had not been tested or treated for COVID, but their deaths were now being blamed on the virus. In other words, the media needed a scary headline, so they admitted they were making things up just to keep us scared. How could I ever trust the news again, when they tell us they are lying to our faces?
A bigger part of the vibe shift comes from the complete absence of anyone facing any consequences for any of their obviously bad decisions during the COVID times. How many politicians lost their jobs because of the bad way they handled restrictions? Gretchen Whitmer got re-elected, as did Justin Trudeau. The politician in California responsible for overlooking billions in taxpayer funded COVID relief fraud? He got a cabinet position out of it. With no one admitting they made mistakes and no one suffering any consequences, how can the average person not feel a (negative) vibe shift?
The institutions we believed in lied to us, over and over; the media, medical professionals, academia. There's no one to trust anymore: we're on our own. And there's no justice: millions of us lost our jobs and our financial security, and no one will take responsibility or even apologize. Yes, there's a vibe shift, and it's a very, very dark one.
Bingo. And to all the Boomers who think we “just don’t care”: you lived through Vietnam and Watergate and you TRUST THE GOVERNMENT NOT TO LIE???
I like this metaphor with the sand: many people changed countless small habits and beliefs during covid, for one to two years. People changed their beliefs because their expectations were violated. They adjusted/adapted (or didn’t). This distorted our cultural frameworks for explaining and understanding reality.
(I’d add this compounded an already-shaken epistemological crisis)
All the particulars changed, and reconfigured the map. So, many social-perceptual changes makes sense. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
The thing I lost… was Gobstoppers.
Four years later, I still can’t find them, let alone the xmas ones that I loved the most. Apparently the sugar they used to make the cores of them was hit hard by the supply chain snarls, and never returned.