The Useful Lessons from Covid’s Weirdness

T here’s nothing like a belatedly revealed sex party to get Covid-19 back in the news. The candid-camera confession by Jay Varma, New York City’s Covid czar, that in 2020 he and his wife were keeping their eyes wide shut at the same time he was helping Mayor Bill de Blasio keep the city locked down would alone have sufficed to revive pandemic-era discontents. His over-the-top rationalization that, because of his stressful position, he needed “some way to blow off steam every now and then” and that in doing so he was being his “authentic self” has intensified the effect.

The sheer weirdness of this story has helped it to stand out more than four years after Covid-19 began. But as the pandemic recedes into the past, America’s collective memory of it is fading. It’s possible that our experience of the novel coronavirus will linger mostly as an anomaly, a time people will want to forget and from which we can learn little applicable to ordinary life. Yet much of what it revealed about the world, from global institutions down to individual people, can and should be instructive.

Start at the global level. Covid-19 taught us what conservatives already knew: Most international institutions are, at best, useless and, at worst, hopelessly compromised. On Covid, the World Health Organization under director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus failed in its mission. By mid January 2020, it was obvious that the virus was spreading between people. But WHO asserted there was “no clear evidence” of this. Tedros then delayed in declaring Covid a health emergency and criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to restrict travel to the U.S. from China. Organizations so clearly defective — and it is hardly alone among institutions of its kind — are in need of serious reform, not to mention that the U.S. should reconsider its participation in them. To that end, congressional Republicans have already taken steps to limit WHO’s ability to impose its will on this country.

It’s hard to ignore that WHO’s perfidy during Covid benefited the Chinese Communist Party. The Covid-19 experience should continue to raise serious questions about the CCP’s relationship with the rest of the world, including the U.S. Like their Soviet forebears, CCP leaders corrupted a supposedly objective institution for their ends. It helped that Tedros took faulty and deceptive CCP data at face value and even praised the CCP’s totalitarian methods of managing the disease. Chinese-government mismanagement unleashed the virus. The cover-up revealed the extent of that regime’s malice. Both should make other nations reevaluate their connections with the CCP, ideally seeking to maneuver economically and diplomatically to isolate and marginalize Peking as much as possible.

Instead, governing and public-health authorities — they effectively became one for a time — seemed to look to China for inspiration in treating their nations’ populations as subjects for technocratic manipulation. It did not initially appear possible that Western, ostensibly free nations would accept excessive lockdown measures imposed by their governments in the first place, or endure them long if imposed. But the epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, of the U.K.’s Imperial College, was hardly alone in noting how such measures could be successfully transmitted, so to speak, from country to country. A fit of government excess ensued throughout the West. But lockdowns didn’t really work in China, nor did they work here. That failure ought to take the shine off not just China’s governing model but top-down solutions in general.

The Covid-19 experience also proved a field day for elite hypocrisy. Ferguson, who had an affair that broke the U.K.-lockdown rules he helped justify, was also hardly alone — Varma, of course, was very much not alone — among well-placed persons in seeing himself as above these absurd laws. In Michigan, home to some of the most incomprehensible lockdown measures — some parts of large department stores were cordoned off, while others were not — the husband of Governor Gretchen Whitmer attempted to get his boat out onto a lake, an illegal act under his wife’s policies. And California governor Gavin Newsom dined with health-care lobbyists at the French Laundry, the famed, and famously expensive, Napa Valley restaurant. And this is not even to mention the wider-scale hypocrisy that sanctioned often-unruly George Floyd protests while weddings, funerals, and other such gatherings remained discouraged.

The 21st century has given us plenty of reasons to distrust our supposed betters. But Covid-19 further demonstrated their contempt for those who entrusted them with power. Those who gave that power to them ought to start figuring out how to take it back, or at least how not to let any more of it go in the first place.

The privations of Covid-19 also showed in brutal fashion that human-to-human, face-to-face interaction is a necessity. In some prior era, when technology had not made a facsimile of communal experience possible, society may have simply had to work around the risks of viral transmission. Technology certainly had its uses, but at the same time that it helped facilitate the suspension of in-person activities, it also laid bare the inadequacies of the digital world against the physical.

Humans need each other. The prolonged loss of contact explains why children suffered from the cessation of in-person schooling, and why social pathologies surged for so many others. Government often hampers civil society. The outright war the state made on it during Covid should affirm the value of the networks of personal and institutional relationships in which we rightly enmesh ourselves, and rally us to the cause of maintaining them.

The individual person matters, too. Extended controversies over vaccination and natural immunity obscured the reality that Covid-19 was most acute for those whose health was already compromised. Some people — the elderly, those stricken with cancer and other diseases, etc. — were not to blame for their vulnerabilities to the virus, of course, and should not ever be hand-waved away in some crude Darwinian fashion.

But if this country still retains a belief in individual agency, then it is appropriate to point out that the overweight were likelier both to get and to suffer severely from Covid-19. The myopic approaches to health that prevailed then not only limited human contact but also led to the closure of gyms (not to mention even more ridiculous steps early on). These policies made it at least a little harder for people to take care of themselves in a way that would prepare them for any challenge, with or without pharmaceutical aid.

It is understandable to want to forget the Covid-19 experience, even when revelations of outrageous abuses of public trust, like Varma’s, surface to remind us of it. But, as that era fades, we would only be hurting ourselves to ignore its lessons.