On Jan. 31, 2020 — with America’s attention mostly focused elsewhere — I watched as the nation’s top health officials trooped to a White House podium and declared that coronavirus was a public health emergency.1
About 1,200 days and more than 1 million deaths later, the U.S. health secretary is ending the public health emergency for coronavirus today.
Covid isn’t over, of course. The virus is still circulating and sickening an unknown number of Americans, probably tens of thousands every day. There are still about 1,000 deaths being linked to covid each week. And if we get a surprising new variant, the pain of the pandemic could still come roaring back.
But “covid is over,” in both symbolic and practical ways. The White House is imminently disbanding its covid response team. National vaccine mandates and other measures are ending today. Thanks to the protections conferred by vaccines and prior infections, the virus threat isn’t what it used to be.
Most Americans long ago moved on.
And recent days have provided vivid examples of slouching across the pandemic finish line, with open questions about what we’ve learned and whether we’re prepared to do better next time.
There’s also minimal attention being paid to this week’s covid milestone, even by officials that you might expect to be celebrating it.
When U.S. covid coordinator Ashish Jha shared his pandemic takeaways on Tuesday morning, he didn’t deliver them to a national audience from the White House podium, as he often did last year. Jha spoke to me and about 15 other reporters, in a room on the second floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (You can hear some clips in our new episode of the “Post Reports” podcast.)
While President Biden’s scheduled to give a Rose Garden address this afternoon, it’s slated to focus on his conservation agenda, barring a surprise.
I don’t think anyone was expecting a presidential celebration on an aircraft carrier with a Mission Accomplished banner behind him — or even a speech in front of CDC, toting a vaccine vial. But I’m struck that Biden, who campaigned on a promise to end the pandemic, is saying so little about a moment that could qualify.
Some of that’s because national leaders have struggled to agree on what we’ve just lived through. Did shutdowns save lives, or not? Did vaccines offer better protection than prior covid infections?2
And what does success in a pandemic even look like?3
After hammering President Trump for hundreds of thousands of covid deaths on his watch, Biden has overseen more covid deaths in his time in office — with the caveat that he’s been in office during more months of the pandemic.
And both presidents took turns vowing to “defeat” or “beat” the virus, at least in the earlier days when it seemed like vaccines could prevent widespread covid infections.4
Given covid’s subsequent surges and surprises, those proclamations now feel like relics of a different time.
(And the idea that we “beat” covid now makes me think of Captain Zapp Brannigan, from the late, great animated TV show, “Futurama,” explaining his genius strategy to defeat the killbots.)
Brannigan: You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.
If 1 million-plus deaths counts as victory over the virus, the price was too high.
Instead, I’d argue we fought covid to a stalemate — at best — a conclusion hammered home by an interesting new book, “Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report.” The report was published last month and authored by about three dozen experts, the latest attempt to grapple with pandemic realities.
You can read my book review at The Washington Post here — no paywall.
The book demands you take it seriously based on the serious people involved: Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, oversaw the project. And in a world where dozens of pandemic books exist, this was a sober effort to distill often-political fights around covid and offer prescriptions for change.
But it’s not clear to me that the book’s prescriptions will be followed, or if there’s energy to pursue the hard reforms that will protect us better next time.
To quote just one example from Zelikow, from our Washington Post Live interview, about school shutdown regrets:
CDC wasn't actually built or designed to make those kinds of choices. It doesn't have those kinds of capabilities. America doesn't really have a national public health agency with operational capabilities around the country that make tradeoffs between loss of education, economic harm, and public health issues. The CDC was never built to make those choices or take those kinds of executive decisions. It was thrust into the position of offering guidances that turned out to be unworkable and sometimes based on bad science.
But the deeper problem is that we didn't really have institutions that were even built to make those choices in the first place.
Zelikow and his colleagues repeatedly compare the U.S. fight against the pandemic to a military conflict, an analogy that I’m not always sure works. But it did make me think about what happens to losers and winners of major wars. Take the Germans and Japanese, who vowed to reform their societies in the wake of their World War II defeats. Or consider the sheer joy across the U.S. as that conflict came to a close.
If we “lost” the covid war, you might expect more national regrets, coupled with enthusiasm for adopting hard-won lessons and implementing real changes, like the agency overhauls that Zelikow and others are suggesting. And if we “won,” there should be some triumphalism — something more than the White House covid coordinator taking a minor victory lap with a handful of reporters on a Tuesday morning.
Instead, it feels to me like we’re ending in a murky middle — a place where Americans generally agree that the pandemic is behind them, that the national response was flawed, but no one’s particularly driven to ensure that we do better. And that’s a disappointing place to arrive if today truly is the day that covid is over.
If I recall correctly, there had been six confirmed cases and not a single U.S. death when the public health emergency was declared. Covid was emerging as a front-page story, but it was still overshadowed by Congress’ first impeachment of President Trump, aptly illustrated by this edition of the New York Times.
One example of this debate — to the frustration of many public health experts — is today’s congressional hearing in the House in front of the covid subcommittee. The hearing’s title: “Investigating Pandemic Immunity: Acquired, Therapeutic or Both.”
As a reporter who’s been covering this pandemic from the beginning, I’ve tried to think about the journalistic version of these questions. Which public health experts have proven themselves reliable and should be cited? What’s the right balance of covering lessons learned versus the current situation? How much should I be writing about covid after the public health emergency ends?
It can be a hard balance to strike. Some readers, particularly public health experts, people who are immunocompromised, or patients who are suffering long covid symptoms, say they appreciate the continued attention on the pandemic. Others — upset over our continued coverage — send angry emails or tweets with assertions like “china virus is over,” so why is The Washington Post still writing about it? Those aren’t equivalent reactions, but it’s a reminder that many Americans are starting from very different places when they see a story about covid now.
Trump repeatedly vowed in 2020 that “we will defeat the virus.” Biden in October 2021 stumped for vaccine requirements and declared “that’s how we beat COVID-19: by working together.”
Did we lose 'the Covid War'?
Maybe the migration from twitter will encourage me to engage more deeply. This was a sad reflection, especially as someone who spent many nights as a small part of the covid tracking project and would be legitimately happy to be a part of an institution better preparing us.