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The skeletons are heading towards a few helpless and frightened people still living in a wasteland. The scene, imagined in the “Triumph of Death” by the elder Pieter Bruegel of the mid-16th century, illuminated the psychic effect of the bubonic plague.
According to historians, it was a fear that persisted even as the disease subsided.
The waves of destruction from Covid-19 have brought humanity to their own despair in the 21st century, leaving many to wonder when the pandemic will end.
“We tend to think of pandemics and epidemics as episodic,” said Allan Brandt, a historian of science and medicine at Harvard University. “But we are not living in the Covid-19 crisis, we are living in the Covid-19 era. There will be many changes that are significant and permanent. We’re not going to look back and say, ‘This was a very bad time, but it’s over now’. We will deal with the many consequences of Covid-19 for decades, decades.”
Especially in the months before the Delta variant became dominant, the pandemic seemed to be almost over.
Medical historian from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Dr. “When vaccines first came out and we started getting needles in our own arms, many of us felt physically and emotionally transformed,” said Jeremy Greene. “We had a conscious desire to translate this as ‘The epidemic is over for me’.”
“This was a deliberate illusion,” he added.
Frank Snowden, a medical historian at Yale University, said there is an often-forgotten lesson in history: How hard it is to declare the end of a pandemic.
It may not end even when physical illness as measured by sickness and death is greatly reduced. This may continue as the economy improves and life returns to normal. The lasting psychological shock of having lived for a long time in fear of severe illness, isolation, and painful death takes a long time to fade.
Some diseases, such as the 1918 flu, receded. Others remained smoldering, like the bubonic plague. HIV is still among us, but there are drugs to prevent and treat it. In any case, for those affected, the trauma persisted long after the imminent infection and threat of death abated.
If nothing else, the Covid-19 virus has humiliated experts who once confidently predicted its course by ignoring the lessons of history.
Dr. “What we are experiencing right now is a new cycle of collective horror,” Greene said. the inability to control the virus, the anger of those who refuse to have their vaccines, and the frustration that surprisingly effective vaccines have yet to bring life back to normal.
No matter when or how pandemics subside, they change people’s perception of time.
Dr. “A pandemic like Covid-19 is a violation of the progressive narrative that medicine advances and diseases are conquered,” Greene said.
As the pandemic lengthens, the days blend into one another as time blurs and slows down with no forward momentum.
In past pandemics, as today, strong anti-science movements have hampered public health and disease decline.
As soon as Edward Jenner introduced the first smallpox vaccine in 1798, posters appeared in England showing people who had been vaccinated “with antlers and hooves”.
“The single largest movement in 19th century England was the anti-vaccine movement,” he added. And while the vaccine resisters resisted, the diseases that needed to be tamed continued.
But historians have said the difference between vaccine skeptics and pandemic misinformation is the rise of social media, which has truly empowered debate and lies in a new way.
On HIV, Dr. “There were conspiracy theories and a lot of misinformation, but it never had a publishing system like Covid-19,” Brandt said.
Other pandemics like this, Dr. Blocked by what Snowden called “excessive arrogance,” the proud certainty of experts added to their frustration in understanding how and when this would subside.
With Covid, leading experts were at first did not help prevent infection, just to reverse themselves later. Epidemiologists have confidently published models of how the pandemic will progress, and What does it take to achieve herd immunity?, it will only be proven wrong. Investigators said the virus was transmitted on surfaces, then no, it spread via tiny airborne droplets. They said the virus was unlikely to transform in any significant way, then warned of further contagion of the Delta variant.
Dr. “We paid a heavy price for that,” Snowden said. Many people have lost confidence in the authorities amid ever-changing directives and strategies that have weakened efforts to control the virus.
Jonathan Moreno, a historian of science and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said the end of Covid would be similar to a cancer in remission – it’s still there, but not deadly.
“You’re not getting any better,” he said. “It is always in the background.”
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