Three years of COVID

We can’t let politics deter us from studying what we did right — and wrong — in our handling of the pandemic.

Saturday marked three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID -19 to be a pandemic. Its current classification is “public health emergency of international concern.”

In short, it isn’t over. Although effective vaccines and better treatments have made COVID -19 a less fearsome disease than it was at the outset, when entire societies all but shut down and health care systems and morgues in New York City and elsewhere were overwhelmed, we are still feeling its effects.

What some pundits had long dismissed as something no worse than the flu was in reality far, far worse. For some perspective: According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the flu claims between 12,000 and 52,000 lives a year in the U.S.; COVID -19 has killed more than 1.1 million people in this country since it emerged in 2020, more than 79,000 in New York alone.

And more than 650 New Yorkers died from COVID -19 in the past month, according to tracking by the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine. People are still catching the disease — an average of 1,394 a day in the state.

But certainly things look brighter.

Unemployment — which surged to 14.7 percent in April 2020 — is now lower than it was before the pandemic: 3.4 percent, compared with 3.5 percent in January 2020. The rolling average of deaths in New York was down to around nine a day this past week. It’s worth noting, however, that we saw numbers that low several times over the past three years, only to see them surge anew. Even as we’re not done with the public health effects of the disease, we’re not done with the social, political, and economic impacts, either. Thousands of businesses failed. Remote work, though a boon for many workers, could have long-term implications for the nature of work and for downtowns that thrived on the presence of companies and the business their workforces brought.

The three-year mark is a time to consider how our governmental and health systems worked well and not so well — how we were caught in many ways unprepared for a national and global health crisis; how vaccines and more effective treatments were developed relatively quickly; how some leaders rose to the greatest challenge of their public careers and others wallowed in petty politics, denying the severity of the crisis, promoting dubious cures, or demonizing health officials and other public servants simply for doing their jobs.

Would fewer people have died had politicians and other ideologues not turned the virus into just one more political issue? It’s likely. But even though we will never know how many needless deaths accrued, it remains important work for those who run our governments and health care systems to study, free of political agendas, what they did well and what they didn’t.

Three years is also a time to remember how the virus brought out some of the best in human nature — the sacrifices of nurses, doctors and other front-line workers; New York City residents’ cheering on their efforts, clapping from their balconies and windows in what became a nightly ritual; the singers and dancers who took to the internet and deserted streets to perform for those stuck in their homes and assure them that humanity endured. And endured it has. For those who remember the dark days three years past, that’s no small thing.