The conversations went like this: It will be just
a few days. It can be kept at bay. There will be
some inconvenience, sure, but the world will
merely be paused — just a short break, out of
an abundance of caution, and certainly not any
kind of major grinding to a halt. Certainly not for
two years.
Certainly not for hundreds of thousands of
Americans who were among us at that moment
in mid-March 2020 — who lived through the
beginning, watched it, worried about it (or didn’t),
and who, plain and simple, aren’t here anymore.
“Just a temporary moment of time,” the man
who was then president of the United States
insisted. Just a few days. Just a few weeks. Just a
few months. Just a few years.
The fact is that on March 12, 2020, no one really
knew how it would play out. How could they?
Flattening the curve — such a novel term then,
such a frozen moment of a phrase today —
seemed genuinely possible two years ago this
weekend, when Major League Baseball’s spring
training games trickled to an end with their
season suddenly postponed, when universities
told students to stay away, when Congress —
astonishingly — began to talk about whether it
would be able to work from home.
“We would recommend that there not be
large crowds,” the nation’s top infectious
disease researcher told Congress two years
ago Friday, presaging two years of arguments
over that exact statement. His name was
Anthony Fauci, and he would become one of
Pandemic America’s most polarizing figures,
caught between provable science and
charges of alarmism and incompetence and