She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, ‘Which way? Which way?’, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
A year ago I wrote a note considering the appearance of a new coronavirus variant, Omicron. I stressed the difficulties of making sense in real time and the need for greater intellectual humility. Insofar as any predictions offered, I simply suggested:
…the most likely outcome is probably another confused muddle, good intentions, bad faith and much else all mixed together by Fortuna’s hand.
The point of this companion piece is not to offer any big judgements on where we find ourselves now, even if on balance it does seem that the appearance and spread of Omicron was a comparatively not bad, relatively fortunate outcome. Rather, it is to note the relative silence with which this anniversary has been marked. The World Health Organization (WHO), New York Times, and The Atlantic each published something, perhaps there has been more extensive consideration on social media, I do not know. When I realised it had already been a year since Omicron appeared, I was rather surprised by how little I had thought about it. Then again, one of the most distinctive aspects of the experience of the pandemic has been the way it has scrambled our sense of our time, as the last few years have increasingly become a blur, shorn of the markers that normally help us locate different moments.
Given the never-ending demand for new content, anniversaries are normally easy hooks for articles. With this in mind, and considering the significance of the appearance of Omicron, I have been struck by the muted response, especially given Katherine Wu observation in The Atlantic that ‘Omicron’s arrival and rapid spread around the world was, and remains, this crisis’s largest inflection point to date.’ One needs to only look at the current predicament China finds itself in with its zero-COVID policy to appreciate how big of a gamechanger it has been. This WHO chart, which has COVID-19 cases in gray and deaths in blue, offers a clear visual representation of Omicron’s impact:
In a prior note on the arc of the pandemic, I considered the judgment of historian of medicine Charles E. Rosenberg, who suggests that such experiences tend to ‘drift toward closure’, ending ‘with a whimper, not a bang.’ It appears that the current pandemic will fit this script. These reflections were made in reference to COVID-19 as a societal phenomena, not the underlying medical and health situation. This accords with Naomi Zack’s description of the pandemic as a ‘social disaster’, by which she means that the ‘disaster is not simply a natural entity or event, but the whole of that event and how it becomes integrated in human society’.
With all that in mind, what does it mean that we have largely overlooked, forgotten or avoided marking the appearance of a variant that has so significantly altered the trajectory of the pandemic? I am not sure, but the relative silence is suggestive. It chimes with what Nancy Bristow argues happened after the Spanish Flu pandemic a century ago, in which the loss and disruption was soon pushed from the collective memory. Once again, there appears to be a latent desire to quickly move on, to push away, to try to forget or disregard the last few years as something like a bad dream. As I noted:
There seems to be a rather widespread desire not to reckon with what has occurred, a certain kind of disavowal. We dash forward to our ‘new normal’, regardless of how abnormal so much of it remains.
While this is certainly understandable, there is a need to account for what we experienced, what we are still experiencing, what will continue to shape and influence our world. As the line from Magnolia goes, ‘we might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.’ More and more, I am noticing small but not insignificant signs of the last few years, markers that remain. Recognising and reckoning with these legacies is a vital part of our challenge.