For better or worse, the pandemic seems slated to fade from our collective memory | Ross Barkan

What will we remember of the plague years? It’s easy to project on to the future what we feel now, the memories of the suffering so visceral, the evidence of the reckoning clear enough. People still get sick and die from Covid. Signage lingers, warning of the defunct 6ft social distancing rule or the importance of hand-washing. Certain American cities and colleges maintain mandates for the Covid vaccine.

More than a million Americans are dead, and their deaths, in the public imagination, were not created equal. In 2020, Covid deaths were a terror, and 100,000 of them were worthy of bellowing headlines on the front page of the New York Times. And then the body counts, for those not experiencing them directly, became more ordinary, the carnage a backdrop to another year.

There was no reprieve in 2021. The pandemic swallowed us up, if not killing then destabilizing; schools closed, crime soared and downtowns, at least temporarily, emptied out. For a period, the largest protests in a half century consumed every city imaginable. Time itself grew strange and elastic, equally fast and slow. Pandemic seasons bled together. It was like nothing else that had come before.

Now the era recedes. Fewer people are dying. The pandemic does not have a hold on the culture any more. This is not a rightwing or leftwing talking point. This is history, psychology, the human need to cope with mass death – the longing to move onward, into the future. The lockdowns demanded in the earliest months could not hold. In some countries, like China, they lasted years, and now the populace is finished. They hope for a version of their 2019 existence. They are no different than anyone else.

What is growing clearer is that the Covid pandemic will not permanently direct the psychic and artistic currents of American society. An inevitable legacy was not inevitable after all. We are learning now why so many Americans and citizens of the world were willing to forget 1918, to bury the flu pandemic and rush headlong into the 1920s. In 1918 and 1919, masks came into vogue, as did frequent outdoor gatherings, and this collective knowledge was slowly lost, the mayors and governors of 2020 throwing caution tape around playground equipment, parks and beaches. A century ago, some schooling was even held on rooftops and hospital beds were moved outdoors.

In 10 or 20 or 30 years, what will be recalled of this pandemic? What precautions, quirks and stylistic imprints will survive? There are pandemic novels but now there are post-pandemic novels. Far easier to elide the period entirely, to consign it to the past. Cinema and television are the same. The Covid episodes of Law & Order – the telegenic cops darting around in their masks, only to drop them when speaking – will end up as visual trivia, curiosities for befuddled future viewers. In 1919 and 1920, the close memories of the first world war overwhelmed the pandemic, and it was the shellshocked generation that came to dominate, with the flu as a footnote, even as it killed many millions.

War, in one sense, was easier to conceptualize. It was loud and visible, of inarguable physical consequence. This kind of death could not happen in the shadows, in hushed bedrooms. A pandemic-ravaged city, in 1918 or 2020, did not lose its office buildings, schools and churches. There were no bombs or airplanes, no smoke plumes or flaming rubble. September 11’s death toll was only a small fraction of Covid’s in New York, but there will probably be no comparable memorial for the more than 40,000 dead. There is no single day to remember them all and no gathering place to recall the lives they lived.

September 11, like war, was a shock event, mass horror condensed and in plain view – the buildings exploded, then collapsed, the smoke cloud hanging for months. Blame was easily conjured and new disastrous wars were launched abroad. The surveillance state was hyper-charged into being, and history was inexorably wrenched in a new direction. Twenty-one years later, we are still taking off our shoes in airports. Armored police bearing assault rifles are now a banal sight.

Covid, conversely, seems fated to fade. It is more difficult to grasp on to. Since it was so disruptive to ordinary life, its rituals are easier to leave behind. We want our holiday dinners. We want to visit grandparents in nursing homes. We want movie theaters. We want the classroom. We want faces, smiling, that we can always see. Remembrance for a single day is simple enough: Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, dates to be ticked off at proper times. Years are another matter. The human minds struggles against death at such a scale.

It’s plausible that Covid will not leave much of a mark on even the second half of the 2020s. Unlike 9/11, there are far fewer documentaries, books and movies to remind us of what was left behind. If Covid became highly politicized, America’s tribalism infecting debates on masks and vaccines, the pandemic itself is fast losing its salience as campaign fodder.

Compared with 9/11, there are fewer Manichean claims to make – Republicans like George W Bush and Rudy Giuliani would exploit the tragedy for years afterward – and the debates of 2021 couldn’t even carry forward into 2022. Republicans were triumphant last fall as they bludgeoned Democrats for supporting the extensive closure of public schools. But the issue hardly registered this year, as voters turned to abortion, crime and inflation. Liberals don’t seem to be masking more readily than conservatives this winter. It is fitting that Dr Anthony Fauci, one totem of this era, is retiring.

For some, Covid’s lack of an imprint on the public consciousness going forward – its failure to register like past catastrophes – is to be lamented. It’s true that the federal government must do far more to prepare for the next pandemic. Vaccine and treatment research should be generously funded. Nursing homes must have stronger protocols. Elected leaders and bureaucrats cannot forget.

Others, though, can be forgiven if they want to slowly regain what they lost in these past two years and nine months. Life can only exist for so long on emergency footing. The post-pandemic future is beckoning and most Americans are going to race there as quickly as they can, just as their ancestors fled from the shadow of the flu.