Breaking news: Not everything is terrible
WE devote a lot of mental energy to things that are going wrong or could go wrong. It’s human nature. But seven months after the start of this plague, we shouldn’t lose sight of the things that went more right than we expected.
Thinking back to the origins of the pandemic in March, we were beset by fear. Would the tanking stock market be the harbinger of another Great Depression? We expected mass unemployment and cratering businesses. We worried that our savings could be decimated.
We feared that the virus would be impossible to vaccinate against.
We believed it likely that the pandemic would increase deaths from other causes as people shunned hospitals and routine care. We thought we needed thousands more ventilators than we could manufacture.
We were concerned that essential services such as electricity generation, water purification and trash collection might be affected, compounding the suffering and contributing even more to the spread of disease.
People hoarded canned goods, toilet paper, spaghetti, bottled water and hand sanitizer. There was a run on guns. People feared that civil strife could be in the offing, and they might have to defend their supplies of ramen noodles and peanut butter from marauding gangs.
We worried that the lockdowns would result in a spike in suicides and that school closings would rob children and teenagers of education and socialization.
Seven months on, some of those worries proved to be well-grounded, but many did not.
The stock market made up all of its losses by August. That’s not to say the economy is in good shape. More than 163,000 businesses have closed, almost 98,000 of them permanently. That represents real hardship. But out of 32.5 million businesses nationwide, that’s still a tiny fraction. Unemployment remains high at nearly 8 percent, but it has declined considerably from above 14 percent in March.
Prospects for a vaccine look promising. And it turned out that ventilators were not as crucial in treating this virus as expected.
Fears about the pandemic increasing deaths from other causes appear to have been correct. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that in March and April, the United States experienced 87,000 excess deaths. About a third were attributed to causes other than COVID-19.
Thanks to the efforts of frontline workers, public services such as transportation, electricity generation, food safety inspection, trash collection, water purification and emergency services continued pretty much without a hiccup. The lights stayed on. The heat and electricity continued to function. Supermarkets remained open and remarkably well-stocked. We did not experience a “Lord of the Flies”-style social collapse requiring armed defense of our pantries.
As for depression, suicide and other psychological effects of the pandemic, the news is mixed. Significant numbers of adults have reported increases in depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Adolescents, on the other hand, are faring better. According to a new report from the Institute for Family Studies, teen mental health has improved since the pandemic and associated lockdowns began.
As awful as it has been, this disease was not the apocalypse we feared. Many aspects of our society proved more resilient than we expected. That should inspire something we haven’t felt much of lately — hope.