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As I was picking up my car from the mechanic last week, the maskless man ringing me up from behind the plexiglass gestured to my mask and asked a by-now familiar question: “Are you sick or trying not to get sick?” He said it with kind curiosity, with none of the ridicule or hostility that so often meets people “still” wearing masks in public. I happily replied that I was trying not to get sick.
He then shared the following information with me: others at the shop had been pressuring him to remove the plexiglass barrier that barely separated him from the customers, but he refused. A friend of his this year died of “it”; the mechanics at the shop are constantly out sick with “it”; and one mechanic lost his leg due to a blood clot after being intubated for three months with “it.” Not once was the word “Covid” mentioned, but we both knew what we were talking about. It had ravaged people he knew, and he wasn’t willing to get rid of the last protective barrier that separated him from the customers who come in sick all the time. In his own way, he insisted on continuing to acknowledge the pandemic by protecting himself the best way he knew how.
The fact that we could talk about Covid without ever mentioning it by name struck me. Others in the waiting room surely heard us, too, and knew what we were talking about. After all, nobody has really forgotten Covid. But what most people have done, collectively, is decide that it is over by fiat; that is, they have ejected Covid from their reality and therefore their vocabulary. “Covid” has become a forbidden word. What has resulted is an unnecessary mystification of the present: gruesome signs of Covid are all around us, as my mechanic saw so clearly, but we are without adequate language to describe it. Colleagues are losing limbs and dying; everyone around us is constantly sick with “mystery” ailments. But the word “Covid” has been banished and with it an acknowledgment of one of the major causes of suffering today.
I remain touched by the small stand that my mechanic continues to take in his workplace. Auto shops are notorious incubators of patriarchal individualism, of a culture that rejects any signs of vulnerability or weakness. He himself is a middle-aged, blue-collar white man, someone I surely would write off as a Trumper in a hasty moment of judgment (and who knows, maybe he is). And yet here he was, acknowledging something that most of my liberal friends and colleagues, the ones who adopt the slogan “science is real” as a rallying cry against conservativism, refuse to revisit. Here he was pushing back against his colleagues’ desire to return to normal — or rather, their desire to reconstruct a landscape without reminders of the pandemic, a kind of semiotic revisionism. And he was doing it all without adequate language for it.
In what follows, I want to present a framework and a language for expressing what I believe he was trying to say, what all of us who are still cautious about Covid are trying to say: that the pandemic isn’t over, that we all still need sensible protections, and that it’s worth uttering its name.
I want to start with the insight that there is more than one way to understand the timing of a pandemic. Let’s start with beginnings: many people think of a pandemic as a biological event marked by the emergence of a new pathogen. All of the early-2020 headlines deal in this type of beginning, using the language of novelty and scientific uncertainty: “What We Know about the New Virus in China;” “New coronavirus cases jump sharply in Europe;” “Investigations underway to identify the cause of illness.”
This biological conception of a pandemic’s beginning is empirically measurable and therefore at home in the sciences. The WHO, for example, defines it as “the worldwide spread of new disease.” The NIH gets more specific, factoring in “novelty, minimal population immunity, explosiveness, fast disease movement, wide geographic extension, infectiousness, contagiousness, [and] severity.” The point is that each of these can be measured, objective minimum thresholds can be decided upon, and the world can be held up to these metrics in order to determine when a pandemic truly began. On this conception, a pandemic can begin long before anyone utters the word.
In fact, uttering the word “pandemic” marks a second conception of a pandemic’s true beginning: namely, pandemic as social event. On this conception, a pandemic’s beginning is marked not merely by the emergence of a new pathogen but also by a collective decision to acknowledge that emergence. In the case of Covid, that acknowledgment finally came in the form of quarantines and closures: “Chinese Authorities Begin Quarantine of Wuhan City As Coronavirus Cases Multiply;” “France closes the Louvre as virus spreads to new fronts;” “Illinois ‘stay at home’ order begins.” These mark the moment(s) that a biological reality is too great to ignore, and so a social decision must be made.
The point here is that the biological beginning and the social beginning of a pandemic need not coincide. The former is a reflection of our microbial world; the latter is our response to that world. In Camus’ novel, The Plague, for instance, we see that the residents of Oran were slow to name what was happening to them as an epidemic despite the fact that illness was rampant. HIV and AIDS were decimating the 1980s queer community for years before it was officially acknowledged as an epidemic. We are immensely capable of looking away from reality when we need to, and this is no different when it comes to epidemiological phenomena. Social beginnings hinge on our willingness to see what’s in front of us.
Social ends operate in much the same way as social beginnings; that is, they can be divorced from the conditions that would meet the agreed-upon threshold for a biological end. Ideally this would never happen, and the social end of a pandemic would come about only after the biological end has run its course. But the two are not necessarily in lockstep, and they very often come apart.
I think nothing reveals this gap more clearly than an ad campaign from CVS that I came across in 2023. The first two slides read: “The pandemic is over, but Covid-19 is here to stay.” The last slide attempted to offer some clarity: “In fact, it’s still among the top 5 leading causes of death in the US.” That put Covid within the ranks of heart disease, cancer, and stroke with respect to the threat it posed to public health. And yet, the pandemic was “over.” What could this possibly have meant?
The CVS campaign is an exquisitely clear example of the difference between the social end and the biological end of a pandemic: on one temporal axis the pandemic is over, while simultaneously on another the pandemic still kills and disables millions. The ad reveals where we were, and are, with respect to Covid: we have collectively decided to no longer consider the biological presence of a deadly contagious pathogen as a social problem. We have, in the words of our society, “returned to normal.” This new normal includes a new, preventable leading cause of death in the United States, one which cyclically reaches infectious peaks that far exceed the initial peak that set off the early alarm bells and sent us all indoors. We are living within the gap between the social end and the biological end of a pandemic; the premature declaration that Covid is “over” has left us fending for ourselves.
In Charles Rosenberg’s wonderful essay on the AIDS epidemic, he describes epidemics in general as having a dramaturgic form: at first, a novel pathogen quietly spreads across a population, navigating “an intricate web of biological relationships” until the suffering and the death that it brings in its wake can no longer be ignored. This heralds the next “act” of the drama, one in which the population is forced to reckon with and accept the intrusion of an uncontrolled epidemic into their ordinary lives. Notably, he observes that “accepting the existence of an epidemic implies—in some sense demands—the creation of a framework within which its dismaying arbitrariness may be managed.” The phrase “dismaying arbitrariness” is key here: though one’s socioeconomic status does turn out to affect one’s susceptibility to Covid infection and death, the virus does not in principle follow any predetermined social pathways. Rich and poor people alike can get infected and die, with an arbitrariness that upends the sense of control that our class-stratified society gives (some of) us. There is an urgent need for meaning-making, for the construction of semiotics and self-understandings that help safeguard our senses of safety and control. Often, the idea of “the vulnerable” does this work by shoring up what was destabilized when the pandemic erupted — they are the vulnerable ones, we are safe.
The drama continues through various fascinating “acts” until we reach the final, contested act: the “end.” Rosenberg writes, “Epidemics ordinarily end with a whimper, not a bang.” There is a long tail in which the early drama is replaced by the tedium of precautions, the exhaustion of solidarity, the impatience with uncertainty. People understandably want to get back to their lives. By this point in the drama, the meaning of the pandemic has solidified and groups differentiated by level of perceived vulnerability have emerged. These very same concepts facilitate the obfuscation of the deaths and disability that continue, either by hiding them from view or by rendering them meaningless. And thus the conditions for denial are reborn. As Rosenberg puts it, “Has a heedless society reverted to its accustomed ways of doing things as soon as denial became once more a plausible option?”
Denial is a powerful force, the engine of the cognitive dissonance that we see in the CVS ad campaign. By denying the value of human life, the millions of Covid deaths, and the new disability running rampant through our populations, we are able to manufacture the social end of a pandemic even in the midst of its biological peaks. This social end, discussed elsewhere in the context of its political economy, directly contradicts the data we receive from the sciences about Covid’s continued presence in our microbial universe. There are two timelines, and the public has chosen to prioritize only one of them.
On top of all of this, there has been a pernicious sleight of hand performed by politicians, corporate leaders, and public health institutions with respect to what exactly is meant when they say the pandemic is over. When Trump said that the pandemic would end if we just stopped testing for it, the public was rightly outraged. We were new to the pandemic, not yet fatigued by the inconvenience of caring for others. And so we could easily see through this proposed sleight of hand; we knew that viruses exist even when we don’t go looking for them. But this is exactly the policy that has been universally adopted under a Democratic presidency: almost every method we developed for measuring the true extent of the pandemic in 2020 has been eliminated, not because the threat disappeared but rather to disappear the threat. Just one reliable metric remains, wastewater data, and it reveals the truth: we are still in a biological pandemic, killing and disabling millions.
To paper over this fact, our public institutions have presented the manufactured social end of the pandemic as if it were a biological end. When they say “Covid is over,” they conflate the two timelines and rely on a misinformed public to not know any better. After all, how could we? All of the useful dashboards reporting test positivity rates in our cities, on our campuses, in our country, are gone. Tests are no longer free. Hospitals are no longer required to report Covid cases to the state. We have done a tremendous job erasing all signs of a pandemic; only the stubborn sickness and deaths and disability remain, and the public is working hard to erase those, too.
What this sleight of hand conceals is the fact that the social end of the pandemic was manufactured to restart the engine of capital as quickly as possible to quell a newly-radicalized society. At least in the United States, the early pandemic ushered in the most robust social safety net that many of us had seen in our lifetimes: we all received a universal basic income; unemployment benefits doubled; child poverty was cut in half; the changes to manufacturing and travel for which climate activists have been agitating for decades were implemented in the blink of an eye. The lie that bureaucracy is slow and the government’s hands are tied was laid bare. We saw, for the first time, what the state could really do for us when it prioritized people over profits.
This radicalized population erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, leading to one of the largest mass movements we had seen in our lifetimes, too. The intertwined nature of racial capitalism was newly visible, as people stuck at home began connecting the dots between our insatiable economy and the death drive of whiteness itself. Our country was rotten to the core, and we finally went outside to join with others and do something about it.
It is no wonder, then, that this marked the high water point of our brief social safety net. Capitalism alone can withstand protest; so, too, can white supremacy and every other form of domination. But when protests and mass movements begin connecting the dots, fighting against the entire intertwined structure, they are met with swift and violent repression by the state. This is exactly what we saw, too. Quarantine times and unemployment benefits were slashed; workers were called back in person; and all of the benefits that lifted our population out of misery for the first time were clawed back. Children were allowed to go hungry again so that their parents were forced back to work; busy at work all day, we simply had less time to protest. We are back to normal in more ways than one.
Given the crushing pace of capitalism “after” the pandemic, it is all the more important that we have the theoretical tools to see through the stories that our leaders are telling about the present (and about the past). This notion of two, simultaneous timelines—the biological and the social—allows us to pick apart their obfuscation and insist on a veridical accounting of where we are with respect to Covid. It allows us to contest the ideology that keeps capitalism afloat, an ideology that cannot properly account for the true value of a human life because all it can see is labor waiting to be extracted. As someone who has dedicated a huge portion of my life to theory, and to theory’s essential role in praxis, I have to insist that this distinction is not a mere idle one. We cannot see what we cannot conceive; by insisting on uttering Covid’s name, and naming what we see in the world, we do our part in caretaking a reality under siege.