The first post-pandemic Leap Day

Today is the first Leap Day of our new era.

By new era, I mean the post-pandemic times we now find ourselves in.

Even though it’s only been four years since 2020, COVID-19 seems to have split time into before and after sections as significantly as B.C. and A.D (or BCE and CE, if you prefer).

Four years ago on this day, the world seemed to be carrying on as it had for many years hence. The most consequential political news of the day was Joe Biden’s victory in the South Carolina primary, a win that paved the way for his nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

News of another sort was brewing. News of a new contagious virus emanating from Wuhan, China, had been making headlines in recent days. The outbreak, first reported in December 2019, soon went global, and hit the United States hard on Leap Day 2020. That’s when the first U.S. death from COVID-19 occurred in Seattle, prompting the governor of Washington to declare a state of emergency.

Less than two weeks later, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Two days later, on Friday the 13th, my employer at the time (Missouri S&T), along with all other University of Missouri System universities, sent students and many employees home to learn and work remotely and ostensibly out of harm’s way.

Soon thereafter, it seems, the whole world shut down.

In the four years since that final pre-pandemic Leap Day, what has changed? It feels like the world now somehow inalterably different from the world we knew before social distancing, lockdowns, Zoom meetings, masks, vaccines, and DoorDash. But how is it different, exactly?

It’s hard for me to articulate, because it seems to have changed in dozens of ways. COVID-19 has changed the way we work, the way we dine out (or not), the way we travel (or not), the ways we connect with one another.

Maybe, with the passage of time, this wedge between the before times and the post-pandemic world will become less distinct, and the “new normal” will become, simply, normal.

Some thoughts from Adam Gopnik’s recent essay in The New Yorker titled “Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?“

Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not. A terrorist attack came and went, was grieved and then memorialized, but big terrorist attacks will happen every generation or so. On the other hand, a life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity. Those few who proposed that the wisest thing to do after 9/11 was to mourn and move on were excoriated, but they may have been better guides than those who insisted that a new age of militance and counter-militance had arrived, and that a global war on terror had to be unleashed. There is nothing to do with a day except to live it, a great poet wrote, and there may be nothing to do with an epochal year except to remember it.

Adam Gopnik, “Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?”

Put in that context, 2020, the pandemic year, may be one to reflect on rather than obsess over. But the pandemic was a different sort of attack than 9/11. The attack was not by terrorists (assuming we are not beholden to certain conspiracy theories) but by a pathogen that, according to some, isn’t done with us yet.

The “nasty, brutish, and long” War on Terror that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks led to expensive military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, increased surveillance of our lives, and significant strains on the social fabric of our nation. But it began with a strong mobilization of support and a surge of patriotic vigor.

The war on COVID-19, if there ever was a thing, did not benefit from any kind of solidarity. There were pockets of solidarity here and there. Remember how New Yorkers would throw open their windows every night at 7 o’clock to cheer the essential workers?

But as the novel coronavirus grew less, well, novel, our nerves grew more frayed, our lives more frazzled, and the pandemic began to drive a deeper wedge into our world, exacerbating the us vs. them dynamic that was already seething in a presidential election year.

While office workers and academics worked from home, laborers, truckers, nurses, physicians, and other front-line “essential” workers continued their day-to-day work, often under greater strain and duress. Children of working parents were left to fend for themselves at home, in front of their monitors (if they had computers). The maskers and anti-maskers squared off. Then the vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. The “China virus” and “Wuhan flu” conspiracy theories gained traction. Voting by mail vs. going to the polls in person.

Meanwhile, social media exacerbated everything. As Gopnik explains, “The paranoia that was already rampant in the social-media age intensified, advancing the corrosion of institutional trust.”

So much was driven by fear and our lack of understanding — not just of the virus, but of ourselves and of our trust, or lack of trust, in social institutions, science, government.

So where does this leave us today, in this post-pandemic world? And will we ever return to the “before times”?

I first heard the term “new normal” after the financial crisis of 2007-2008, during a discussion about university finances (read: budget cuts) in the wake of that crisis. But I’ve since learned the phrase goes back to the end of World War I, which coincides with a previous pandemic, the influenza outbreak that killed millions worldwide.

To consider the problems before us we must divide our epoch into three periods, that of war, that of transition, that of the new normal, which undoubtedly will supersede the old. The questions before us, therefore, are, broadly, two: How shall we pass from war to the new normal with the least jar, in the shortest time? In that respect should the new normal be shaped to differ from the old?

Henry A. Wise Wood, “Beware!” National Electric Light Association Bulletin, 1918

Perhaps, with the passage of time, the “before times” and today won’t seem to stand in such stark contrast as they do now. Unfortunately, the lingering effects of our pandemic year — the divisiveness, the decline in institutional trust, and most notably, the virus that will not die — remain.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay