The Pandemic, Five Years Later: How We’ve Changed, and How We Haven’t

We’ve tried to memory hole it, but we can’t.

The pandemic does not have an anniversary, because how could it? My friend and old editor David Wallace-Wells, who was/is the foremost chronicler of the Covid age, wrote this week that the pandemic had so many different stages that we have had no choice but to flatten it, to turn it into one collective experience that we all went through, processed and then moved on from, though of course nothing could possibly be further than the truth. In the early days of the pandemic, one of the most common refrains, along with “flatten the curve,” was we’re all in this together. But that is the exact opposite of what we were. I’m not sure we’ve been remotely together since.

Unofficially, I’ve always considered March 11, 2020, a date we’ll hit the fifth anniversary of this coming Tuesday, the start of the American version of the pandemic. Obviously, it had hit China and swaths of Europe, most notably Spain, before then, and there were segments of the country, specifically the Pacific Northwest, whose Covid story began earlier than the rest of the country’s. But March 11 was:

• The night that Utah Jazz forward Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid minutes before he was supposed to take the floor for a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder and days after he famously touched every reporter’s microphone as a way to mock the NBA’s new Covid protocols. This would led to a shutdown of the NBA and, less than 24 hours, all American sports, including the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament.
• Tom Hanks announced on Instagram that he had tested positive while filming the movie Elvis in Australia, in a moment memorably satirized in the hilarious ending to the Borat sequel:

• Then-President Trump addressed the nation live in the Oval Office, as he sniffled and slurred and made it vividly clear that, as the most dangerous public health threat of the last 100 years landed on American shores, the worst…