Many posts have discussed COVID. Five years later, we are only now starting to grasp its long-term consequences.
Erica Pandey and Erin Doherty at Axios:
Covid was a top issue in 2020 exit polls, with 52% of voters saying controlling the virus itself was more important than rebuilding the post-pandemic economy.That mindset shifted over the next four years, as closed schools, inflation and isolation frustrated voters — and changed many of their votes.
"Younger voters are in the process of understanding who they are and what their values are, and that was disproportionately shaped by Covid," says John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. "It intensified economic anxiety and created this survivalist mindset.""Democrats helped create this vacuum, which was filled by Trump and Trump-aligned podcasters and influencers."
Case in point: In 2020, voters under 30 broke for Joe Biden by 24 points, but in 2020, Kamala Harris only won the youth vote by 4 points, The Atlantic reports.
And many parents in deep blue cities and towns flipped their politics after seeing the effect of school closures and Covid isolation on their kids.
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Those who experience these events from the ages of 18 to 25 are more likely to develop a lasting lack of trust in political institutions and leaders, according to a study from the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics.
"You can think of epidemics as somewhat of a stress test for governments. Leaders have to respond fast and with the right policies," says Orkun Saka, the study's author. "There is almost no way to get it completely right. When you get it especially wrong, there is a deep scar in the eyes of the young generation."
Study after study after study has confirmed what everyone I know has expressed: that the pandemic altered our sense of time, which has in turn warped our memory. One study from a year into the pandemic asked participants to describe their experience of time and then sorted their responses into formal-sounding but utterly familiar categories, such as “temporal rift” (“Everything that happened before the pandemic feels like it happened in some distant era, in the ‘Before Times’’’) and “temporal vertigo” (“The pandemic itself seems to be going on for both 10 years, and two weeks”).
The covid-19 pandemic, which to date has killed between 7 million and 20 million people worldwide, including more than 1.2 million Americans, is almost perfectly designed to be forgotten.
For starters, it had two modes, both of which resist memory. One mode was horrific. People saw loved ones die struggling for breath — or couldn’t see them at all because of safety protocols. Front-line health workers risked their lives and witnessed horrors in understaffed, underequipped hospitals. For those who experienced the pandemic as extreme trauma, memories of specific events are often too painful to revisit — and acute stress can make retrieving those memories more difficult.
The other pandemic mode was humdrum. Most of us who were spared life-and-death trauma probably experienced the pandemic as featureless tedium: day after day in the same place with the same people and no present or future events to divide the calendar into little memorable bites. “Gone are the rehearsals that made Sundays Sunday, the town board meetings that made Wednesdays Wednesday,” I wrote at the time, in a column about why my family of nonbelievers decided to hold a Zoom Shabbat (essentially, to make a Friday feel like Friday). “Time stretches out, unmarked, unshaped and, therefore, incomprehensible.”
