The COVID Histories We Have Forgotten

On March 11, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic became real in the United States. The virus itself had already been circulating, but this was the day that the public began the lockdown process. The pandemic was officially declared as such, Trump announced a travel ban from Europe, and the NBA started canceling games.

It was a Wednesday, my last day teaching in-person classes for seven months. I remember the school getting together in a crowded auditorium to hear our head discuss what was next. I remember being incredulous when he said there was a possibility that we would be remote until the end of the year. Oh how naive I was.

Every March 11th since I have tried to give remembrance to the early days of the COVID pandemic. I mourn those we lost and try to hold on to the actual lived experience of the early pandemic, not the bullshit narratives that have circulated since.

Saturday the 14th brought an orgy of panic buying. Thankfully my spouse had already bulked up on supplies when COVID spread to Italy, wisely seeing that we would not be spared. That day I went out and got my hair cut, then I got some fresh fruit and meat from the local Asian supermarket and Polish butcher, places overlooked by the bougie townsfolk standing in line at Whole Foods. That day my personal quarantine began, a surreal two-month period lasting until the end of May.

We have decided to forget so much about this time, partly because of the trauma. My state of New Jersey was the hardest hit in the country. Local news sites brought stories of dead in my community every day. Musicians I loved, like Adam Schlesinger and John Prine, died early on. Their songs brimmed with such humanity, making their losses feel especially hard in a time of fear and anxiety.

Even people here in Jersey have forgotten that in the midst of this horror, the president of the United States was refusing to help us unless our governor debased himself. Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declared this a “New York problem.” People were dying and Trump and his allies were turning their backs after weeks of denying that COVID was a problem in the first place. Trump himself claimed it would all be over by Easter, and promoted such health remedies as injecting bleach.

Trump’s initial inaction and denial cost us crucial time at the beginning of the pandemic, when a fast response mattered most. His negligence led to thousands of deaths, but it’s like it never even happened. Perhaps the most destructive presidential failure in my lifetime (the Iraq invasion runs neck and neck) has gone down the memory hole. It’s not just that January 6th happened, it’s that half the country is committed to the notion that COVID was “not a big deal.” Right-wingers like DeSantis are accusing Trump of having done too much to stop COVID. For so many Americans the inconvenience caused by disease and death is more important than the disease and death itself. Supporting vaccine research was the main thing Trump got right, but conservative politics have become so insane that he has to run away from that decision. This insanity is borne out by the massive discrepancy in COVID deaths since vaccination in “red” and “blue” areas.

Over a million people have died of COVID, but our nation has settled into a comfortable state of denial. From Trump’s first refusal to take it seriously, this denial has had a political edge. The refusal to vaccinate is another example of the depths of that denial. It is rooted in an ideology that says we are all individuals out for ourselves, that any collective solidarity is to be feared, that each of these atomized individuals has the right not to give a shit or even be inconvenienced by collective sacrifice. The pandemic threatened that worldview, so the only way to resolve the very real demands of the disease to take collective action was to pretend it wasn’t necessary.

I feel like this dynamic has left the rest of us with our own suppressed histories. We have had to grapple with how to carry on relationships with people in our lives who did not take the pandemic seriously while death raged. I knew in 2020-2021 this caused a lot of strain in many families and friendships, but those of us who tried to fight the good fight in the face of indifference have had to swallow all of this in the years since. No apologies are coming, we have been made to knuckle under and forget.

The forgotten experience of the pandemic has been especially acute for so-called “essential workers.” They braved disease and death with nothing more than lip service as their reward. In fact, service workers on the front lines soon faced blame, being told “nobody wants to work anymore.” The white collar workers who treat being called into the office again as some kind of crime against humanity have nothing to say about the line cooks who died so they could get food delivered to their doors while they worked over Zoom. Teachers completely changed their practice from top to bottom twice and even three times to account for the pandemic and have been rewarded with vicious political attacks. Nurses have been quitting the profession en masse.

The denialists never wanted to remember, and the rest of us aren’t too keen on reliving the traumas of the brutal two-year period that began on March 11, 2020. I, however, will not forget. I hope you don’t either.