The First Week of the Rest of Time
Although people are still dying of Covid-19 in large numbers, we seem to have decided that the pandemic is over.
Sometimes it’s easy to tell when something ends and something else begins. On January 20, 2017, Barack Obama’s tenure as president ended and Donald Trump’s began. Other times, however, it’s hard to tell. When did the medieval era end and when did the modern era begin in Europe? Historians disagree about the century, let alone the date.
People the world over have been wondering when the COVID-19 pandemic would end and normal life would resume. I think you can argue that, in the United States, it happened this week—although “normal life” means something very different from what it meant two years ago.
Obviously COVID-19 is still with us and is killing more than 1,000 people every day in this country alone. A “pandemic” describes an acute social phenomenon, however. We don’t say that the 1918 flu pandemic is still going on, even though the virus that caused it still, through its descendants, kills tens of thousands of people every year. Gradually, we return to some approximation of the way we used to live, and we come to accept the persistence of the disease as part of the new normal. For the 1918 pandemic, that means that some of us get flu shots and…
