Letter to Editor | The pandemic is not following a script

It is a comforting idea. If history follows a script, then crises eventually resolve themselves: pandemics come and go, society returns to normal, and humanity adapts.

Popper argued that this belief is wrong.

History does not move along a predetermined track. It changes direction based on the choices people make, and sometimes the choices they fail to make.

We tell ourselves similar stories about other dangers. After the Cold War, many believed major wars between great powers had become impossible. Looking at where we are today, this seems catastrophically short-sighted. Before the 2008 financial crisis, economists spoke confidently about a new era of economic stability, and now we find ourselves on the brink of a major economic shock due to war. In the mid-twentieth century, public health leaders suggested humanity had largely conquered infectious disease, and here we are in the midst of a pandemic, with another (H5N1) lurking in the shadows.

Even the 1918 influenza pandemic—the deadliest in modern history—was quickly folded into this narrative. Within a few years much of the world declared the crisis over and moved on. Yet the effects of that pandemic continued to surface for decades, from long-term neurological illness to lifelong health and economic impacts among people exposed to the virus before birth. (A recent study confirmed  that SARS-CoV-2 can directly infect the organs of fetuses, while those organs are still developing. We won’t know the long-term implications of that for decades.)

Each of these moments shared the same assumption: that the future would follow the same reassuring pattern as the recent past. Again and again, history proved otherwise.

We can see historicist thinking everywhere in how we talk about COVID today.

Public officials usually describe the pandemic as something we have left behind. Health guidance increasingly treats COVID alongside seasonal illnesses like flu and RSV, emphasizing that life is returning to normal. The underlying assumption is clear, that pandemics follow a familiar arc: crisis, adjustment, and recovery. Washington State health officials declared in 2024 that “This updated respiratory virus isolation guidance reflects that we’re in a better place now in the COVID-19 pandemic… while life is returning to normal in many ways.”

COVID has infected billions of people worldwide; for most, repeatedly. Scientists are still trying to understand the long-term effects, including the condition now known as Long COVID. In Washington State alone, surveys suggest that roughly six percent of adults report experiencing it. There may be many more who don’t even know they have Long COVID.

Six percent may not sound large until you realize it represents hundreds of thousands of people. Yet the most common narrative we hear is that we’ve adjusted; that COVID is “mild,” and that the pandemic is “over.”

That story may feel reassuring, but it carries a dangerous implication: If the trajectory of the pandemic is predetermined, then no one is really responsible for its outcome. It shifts responsibility away from health officials, even away from doctors, and onto individuals who may or may not fully understand the devastating long-term implications of viruses like COVID that set up reservoirs in our bodies.

What if we find 20 years from now that, rather than everyone being fine, large numbers of people develop serious neurological disease as a result of COVID infections?

The truth is, the future of this pandemic will be determined by choices: whether governments invest in research and prevention, whether institutions take chronic illness seriously, and whether the millions of people already living with Long COVID are treated as a public health priority or left to cope on our own.

If we allow ourselves to believe that history inevitably solves problems on its own, we will discover—too late—that what we called “inevitable” was really just neglect.