How Will History Reflect on U.S. Reaction to COVID?

In the aftermath of the autumn and winter of 1918-1919, physicians looked back on their struggle with influenza with a sense of failure. One prominent professor of medicine, frustrated by his inability to cure the sick, lamented that the virus had waved a red flag in the faces of the world’s physicians.

For nurses—who at that time were not charged with saving lives but rather providing compassionate care for their patients—the outlook was brighter. Firsthand accounts by nurses, many of whom took only a basic course offered by the Red Cross, revealed that they tended to view their efforts as largely successful, albeit within the context of their responsibilities as caregivers.

For most of the rest of America and the world, it was as if influenza never happened. Academic historians of early-20th century America mostly ignore the epidemic, though perhaps now living through COVID, more attention will be focused on the influenza pandemic among academics and their students.

As incredible as it might seem now, I suspect that COVID, too, will pass into murky memory. Could we really tuck away the deaths of almost a million Americans to the back pages of our collective memory and shared past? I believe we will.

In preparation for writing this article, I surveyed my students. The typical answer about how they currently feel about the pandemic: They are frustrated and exhausted. For many, the loss of their senior year of high school with its attendant pageantry, and the changed landscape they encountered when face-to-face classes resumed, wore them out.

Most said they would not communicate much or anything about the epidemic to their children.

The reasons generally centered around the notion that future generations would learn about COVID in school and the desire of young people to just move on to a world without epidemics. This is an understandable reaction.

Even more than the 1918 flu, COVID was a subtle killer to a generation of Americans raised on lurid, and almost wholly fantastical, portrayals of epidemics.

In most Hollywood features, victims of epidemic disease are beset with very bloody symptoms (we can thank numerous misrepresentations by authors and screenwriters of the pathology of Marburg, Ebola, Nipah and other viral hemorrhagic diseases for that tired trope) while the walking dead shuffle from home to hospital before being carried from hospital to trench grave or burn pit. COVID doesn’t meet the gruesome expectations the public expects.

Most importantly, as I stated in my first article and in numerous articles and interviews since, COVID generally confined its depredations to the aged.

As ashamed as I am to admit it, I propose that our nation has spoken. What was said by our refusal to vaccinate, to wear masks even on airplanes, to socially distance and a million other instances of selfishness wrapped in the reason and shoddy excuse of individualism, was that the aged matter far less than the young. By our words and misdeeds, we collectively consign that unlucky group (think the poor, the religious or ethnic minority and now, the old) to whatever fate awaits them.

Can one even imagine our nation’s collective reaction, to say nothing of its deep state of grievous sorrow, if we were now forced to ponder the deaths of 900,000 teenagers and young adults?

When the dust settles, our nation will have lost a million Americans. A million. Could you imagine this sort of toll even as recently as the spring of 2020?

Like the 1918 epidemic, the serious person will reflect on whether the pandemic’s real influence was not in its forgotten harvest of death, but in its influence on other events.

Consider whether the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, would have occurred without the anger over election results and anxiety and frustration caused by pandemic restrictions?

Did society’s reliance upon some of its lowest paid, least recognized laborers—the nation’s store clerks, for instance—fuel calls for a greater equity among citizens regardless of color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender status and any other division that cleaves and weakens our nation?

I suspect that we will forget the dying quickly. Families and friends will remember individual deaths, but there will be no COVID quilt. No bells were rung when the first vaccine for COVID passed field trials.

To understand the impact of COVID, we will turn to discerning the elusive ways that the virus influenced our nation and its institutions.

Dr. James Higgins is formerly an American studies instructor at Thomas Jefferson University. An urban historian with a unique perspective into the COVID-19 pandemic, he wrote “The Health of the Commonwealth: A Brief History of Medicine, Public Health, and Disease in Pennsylvania,” which was published by Temple University Press and released in 2020.