New book: Expect a party, post-pandemic
Yale professor says history of plagues points to a lively 2024
Sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis spotted the pandemic train coming early, well before the darkness struck us in mid-March. He also gazes on a history-informed crystal ball about the post-pandemic period, when the world finally emerges from the long, dark journey.
In his new book, “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live,” the Yale professor refers to the Roaring Twenties after World War I and the 1918 Flu Pandemic.
“I’m not saying we’ll have flappers and whatever,” he said in a recent phone chat , “but I do think we’ll have an efflorescence of the arts. There are Gallup surveys showing religiosity is rising, which has happened with all plagues. People find God. Spending is declining... people become more abstemious, they avoid social contact.”
But that locked-down and masked public will be itching to bust out.
“When finally you’re free again, you’re gonna want to go out and enjoy life... parties and musical events and sporting events and political rallies,” he said. “You haven’t had the opportunity to spend money on very much the last few years if you’ve been employed. We’ll spend. This is typically seen after plagues.”
The post-pandemic prediction was summed up in the New York Post Monday as “sex, sacrilege and spending,” which Christakis chuckles at, noting it was based on an interview he did with The Guardian in which he referred to the Roaring Twenties.
“It’s not a bad coinage, classic New York Post. But it’s not what I said,” Christakis said with a laugh.
Dr. Christakis is also a physician, social network researcher and was seen in the PBS program “Networld” as the pandemic exploded in March. With his wide research interests as a social epidemiologist, he had some research contacts with Chinese scientists using phone data. He started noticing some amazing things based on public movement in December 2019.
“I was therefore paying a lot of attention by the middle of January to what was happening in China,” he said. “And I was then aware that by Jan. 25, the Chinese had ordered 930 million people to be on home confinement. ... The Chinese, in essence, saw in the virus such a serious threat, that they detonated a social nuclear weapon to stop it. And that really got my attention... I was like ‘Whoa, this is gonna be a very serious respiratory pandemic.’”
At that point, Christakis devoted half of his Yale lab’s attention to virus research and now that’s up to 80 percent. Experts on epidemiology like Christakis were talking about it with alarm, but none of America’s leaders were. (In fact, he says in his book, by the end of January the Chinese had already published 40-50 papers online and in journals describing this pathogen.)
In February, he noted, “Italy collapsed, and I did not see (Americans) preparing. There was no public messaging, no PPE, there was no stockpiling of ventilators. No discussion of social distancing or flattening the curve.”
He sent out basic informational tweets on his modest Twitter account and many went viral. That hunger for information gave him the idea to write the book.
Christakis noted that “The Bush administration left the Obama administration which left the Trump administration a playbook for coping with respiratory pandemics.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts out a book every two years about pandemic preparedness but it’s ignored in good times and too slowly employed in a crisis, he said. So Christakis began writing this book and finished it mid-summer.
“I saw so much denial in our society in February and March, and lack of preparation, that my motivation was to try and help the American public to understand what was happening to us and what was going to happen to us,” he said.
The title refers to a Greek story Christakis grew up with in which the god Apollo sends plague arrows to punish Agamemnon “and the funeral piles burned night and day with the dead of the Greeks,” he quotes from memory.
Christakis said history teaches us that this pandemic period is not unprecedented.
“This way we’re living right now seems so alien and unnatural, but what’s important to understand is that plagues are not new to our species, they’re just new to us,” Christakis said. “So all things we’re seeing, from doctors dying ... to people dying alone — this was described by multiple observers during the Black Death and even during the HIV epidemic in our country — to the blaming of minority groups, the closure of borders ... the belief, even in our president, in quack medicines, the denial, the lies and the fear. All of these things are features of epidemics and have been for thousands of years.”
The COVID-19 scourge is a once-in-a-century event, he said, alluding to a table of respiratory pandemics near the end of his book from an expert named Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was writing about such things “when I was in elementary school,” marveled Christakis.
There is a unique element to this pandemic, however, in the speed of the vaccine response.
“We are the first generation of human beings whose time in the crucible of plague has occurred at a moment when we are able to, in real time, invent efficacious counter-measures,” he said. “We ... have successfully invented vaccines for this condition in 10 months. ... It’s miraculous that we’re able to do that.”
Getting them to the mass population will prove to be as long or longer though, to achieve herd immunity. Which is the downside since the virus is still spreading. That should take another year, he estimated, with continued mask-wearing and school and travel disruptions. And Christakis is wary about another viral wave next winter.
Following that will be a period of time to recover socially, health-wise and economically, in 2022 and 2023.
“I think the post-pandemic period will begin in 2024, when life will return mostly to normal with some persistent changes,” Christakis said, such as working from home and business travel.
During the 2015-16 academic year at Yale, Christakis was the focus of controversy after he defended his wife, Erika Christakis, who had questioned the need for a letter from the Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee cautioning students against wearing Halloween costumes that might offend racial or ethnic groups.
Nicholas Christakis, then head of Silliman College, was confronted by angry students accusing him of not providing a “safe space” at the residential college. He and his wife, then associate head of Silliman, resigned their posts and Erika Christakis, an early-childhood educator, left her position as lecturer at Yale.