As this essay goes to press, the pandemic has unexpectedly returned to the headlines. Dr. Anthony Fauci recently appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where he invoked his Fifth Amendment right rather than answer questions from investigators examining his actions and the government’s pandemic response. The hearing followed the public release of more than a thousand pages of Fauci’s pandemic diary by Senator Rand Paul, reigniting debate over decisions that shaped the lives of millions.
It is part of a broader congressional effort to revisit decisions made during the pandemic, including public messaging about masks, school closures, vaccine mandates, dissenting scientific views, federal support for virology research, and the still-unresolved question of COVID-19’s origins. Critics argue that officials projected greater certainty than the evidence justified, marginalized competing scientific opinions, and failed to acknowledge mistakes as new evidence emerged.
Fauci’s diary has become controversial because it appears, in several places, to diverge from his later public account of his role during the pandemic. Critics point to entries suggesting he personally urged officials to close schools while later minimizing that role in public statements. Other entries describe a pulmonary infarction Fauci experienced in 2021 after receiving COVID vaccinations, a medical event that was not publicly known while he continued reassuring Americans about vaccine safety. As Sen. Rand Paul wrote on X, “More than a million Americans died during COVID, many of whom died alone. Businesses were shattered. And people were forced to choose between complying with vaccine mandates or losing their jobs. Refusing to answer questions about what took place does not honor those we lost, yet that’s what Anthony Fauci chose to do.”
Whatever history ultimately concludes about Anthony Fauci and the officials who directed the pandemic response, the renewed scrutiny reminds us that the pandemic remains unfinished history. We continue to debate not only who made which decisions, but what those decisions cost, what they accomplished, and how they changed the society that emerged afterward. Political accountability is only part of that reckoning. There is also the quieter question of what those years did to the rest of us.
For most of us, the pandemic ended quietly. The world today resembles the one we left in 2019, but only in outline. It is like walking through a familiar neighborhood after years away. The streets are the same, yet something important has changed. Many friends have died, some inexplicably.
This sense of returning to a world that is both familiar and altered is not unique to us. I sometimes wonder what Europe must have felt like after the Black Death passed through the middle of the fourteenth century. The comparison has obvious limits. COVID caused enormous loss, but the Black Death destroyed communities on a scale that is nearly impossible to comprehend. In some regions, half the population may have died. Villages were abandoned, whole families disappeared, and the living inherited houses, tools, fields, and positions their former occupants had left behind.
We know something about the economic consequences. Labor became scarce, wages rose, and surviving workers found themselves able to demand conditions that would once have been unthinkable. Authorities tried to restore the previous order, but that order depended upon millions of people who were no longer there. What we cannot know as easily is how an ordinary morning felt.
What did it feel like to walk through a market that had reopened after months of death? Did the familiar stalls seem comforting, or did every empty place recall the person who once stood there? When church bells returned to marking weddings rather than funerals, did people feel relief, guilt, or simply exhaustion? How long did it take before a crowded room stopped feeling dangerous?
Historical records tell us what people earned, where they moved, and which laws their rulers passed. They tell us less about the silence and pain that followed. The private realities of survival rarely enter the record.
The people who lived through the plague simply woke each morning inside a reality that had been permanently rearranged and downsized. Our own streets do not contain that degree of visible absence, yet the emotional pattern is recognizable. Something significant has changed, even if it is difficult to pinpoint. During lockdown, people spoke constantly about returning to normal. Normal became a destination, almost a promised land. We pictured full restaurants, open schools, crowded theaters, and faces unobscured by masks. We rarely asked whether the people returning to those places would still be the same.
By the time the doors reopened, many of us had changed in ways we did not yet understand. Some discovered they preferred working from home. Others realized friendships they had considered permanent had quietly disappeared. Children lost years of ordinary social experience. Older people learned that the world could classify their deaths as collateral damage.
The pandemic exposed the machinery beneath ordinary life. It showed us which jobs could stop and which could not, who could retreat into safety and who had to remain exposed. It showed what would happen to those who refused to conform and would not take the jab. For a brief period, those divisions became impossible to ignore. Then the machinery cranked up again.
The Black Death also unsettled religious and moral assumptions. People had been taught that the world possessed an intelligible order. Then death arrived indiscriminately, taking the devout and the corrupt, the wealthy and the poor, adults and children. For many survivors, the world was suddenly full of strangers.
The COVID pandemic altered how we regarded strangers. Another person’s breath became a possible danger. A cough in a grocery store could change the emotional temperature of an entire aisle. We learned to calculate distance instinctively. We stopped standing six feet apart, but something of social distancing remains.
The pandemic also altered trust. Institutions that had once seemed authoritative came to be viewed with suspicion by millions. Trust, once fractured, proved difficult to rebuild.
There was no public ritual to mark what had happened. No monument could encompass the scale of the experience or the radically different ways people endured it. Some lost parents, partners, livelihoods, health, or years of their lives. Others fared better: they worked from home, ordered groceries, and waited.
After earlier plagues, communities created processions, memorials, and paintings. We have done comparatively little with our own crossing. Perhaps the experience became too politically charged to mourn collectively. Perhaps digital life encouraged us to move on before we had fully processed what had happened. But undigested experience does not disappear. It returns indirectly, in loneliness, impatience, and the nagging feeling that another disruption could arrive without warning and overturn the structures we have once again begun to trust. For many, it also remains in chronic illness, unresolved grief, and questions that have never been fully answered.
The people who survived the Black Death could not rebuild the Europe that existed before it. Too many people were gone, and too many assumptions had been broken. What emerged was a different world.
Our transformation is quieter, but perhaps that makes it harder to recognize. The buildings remain standing and most institutions retain their names. The trains run, the shops are open, and planes fill the sky. Because the physical world looks intact, we are tempted to believe the rupture has been healed.
But it hasn’t. Perhaps that is one reason Anthony Fauci has returned to the center of public attention. We are still examining the decisions made during the pandemic because we are still trying to understand what went down behind the scenes. Accountability remains owed to all of us.
We continue moving through familiar landscapes haunted by the lives we expected to be living. We returned to our streets, offices, schools, and restaurants, but we brought our altered selves into them. The world we remembered no longer exists. It became a ghost of itself. In some ways, so did we.