It’s been five yearscanalipg, and more than 20 million deaths globally. The first official case was in December 2019. The World Health Organization designated Covid-19 a public health emergency at the end of January 2020, the U.S. government declared it a national emergency on March 13, and every single state ordered or recommended schools close at some point between March 16 and March 27. What followed was trauma: years of mass mortality, inescapable infection and deep disruption, even to the lives of the relatively safe.

Next week I’ll be publishing an essay reflecting on where that world-historical whirlwind eventually left us, focused less on the emergency itself than on all the ways, both obvious and subtle, an unthinkable — even unbelievable — mortality event transformed our world. But today I just want to remind us where things started, half a decade ago now.

My first hint came via Twitter on Dec. 31, 2019, when I saw the health and medicine journalist Helen Branswell warning of “unexplained pneumonias” in China. The plot beats that would follow were, in certain ways, familiar enough, Hollywood and science fiction having taught us all about global health emergencies and what might be done to stop them. But although I could easily imagine a pandemic unfolding onscreen, I couldn’t really believe we’d end up living through one, so deep were my intuitions that plagues were — at least in the wealthy world — a thing of the past. Whatever I’d heard from scientists about the risks of this or that future outbreak, I was living firmly in epidemiological denial.

Two months later, in the first days of March, I found myself having dinner with an old friend who told me that he and his father had recently made a casual bet about how many Americans would ultimately die of the disease. His father had bet the total would be under 100,000; my friend had guessed more. “What do you think?” he asked me. I grimaced a little. “I’d take the over at a million,” I said.

9rbet

I was reminded of this all recently when reading about a similar bet that the writer and podcaster Sam Harris said he made with his former friend Elon Musk at the beginning of the pandemic. (It’s ugly but perhaps illuminating to realize how many responded to the scary news by gambling on it.) Musk’s intuition was that the whole thing would just go away. On March 19, 2020, he tweeted that “on current trends,” the country was headed to no new cases sometime by the end of April, and he bet Harris that the outbreak would produce fewer than 35,000 cases in total. When the official count of Covid deaths passed 35,000 in April, Harris wrote to Musk to ask, cheekily, whether this meant he’d won the bet. Musk did not respond. In fact, to read Harris’s retelling of it, that was the end of their friendship and the moment he watched his old comrade disappear into a kind of alternate reality.

Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths with a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.

Thinking back on the past five years, what were the biggest long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on you? In what ways did it change you or your perception of the world?

Times Opinion is hoping to publish a selection of these responses in a future article. Please let us know if you do not want your comments published.

66br

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

This week, it was Bernie Moreno, the Republican running to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, suggesting that abortion rights shouldn’t concern women over the age of 50 — “I don’t think that’s an issue for you,” he said on tape in Warren County, Ohio, over the weekend, as first reported by the NBC affiliate in Columbus.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.canalipg