In the spring and summer of 2020, before we quite understood how weirdly uneven the American experience of COVID would be, the media produced a spate of “COVID will change everything” articles. Remember “COVID will be the end of the brick-and-mortar college”? Or “COVID will kill public transit”? Obviously, we can’t say with any real confidence yet what COVID “has done,” in terms of societal shifts. But, looking at the cultural remnants of past infectious diseases, we can get a general sense of the sorts of things that might stick around as “hangovers.” Chances are Americans will be left with a grab bag of COVID-related adaptations: some useless, some useful; some cruel, some generous; some intelligent and wonderful, some regressive and restrictive. The verdict will be decades in the making.
Many familiar—and good!—features of our houses and cities came about as responses to 19th century epidemics of contagious disease. Terrifying bouts with cholera in the first half of the 19th century led to the building of municipal sewer systems and better regulation of housing; in the baby city of Chicago, in 1833, officials prompted by fears of the contagious waterborne disease banned disposal of animal carcasses in waterways and instituted practices of street cleaning and waste disposal. Because some people believed disease was spread by miasma, or “foul air,” architectural responses to 19th century epidemics included verandas, wider spacing between buildings, outdoor courtyards, and tree planting. The discovery of germ theory in the late 19th century prompted new changes to the way houses were built, like the switch from armoires to closets to make rooms easier to clean, and the inclusion of a half-bath on the first floor to contain visitors’ germs away from where the family might bathe.
Cholera-inspired sanitation regulations aside, cities’ experiences of epidemics didn’t always translate into upgrades in quality of life for those whose living conditions weren’t great. Last year, I interviewed Kathryn Olivarius, a historian who is writing a book about yellow fever and social inequity in New Orleans in the 19th century. What happened in that city, I wondered, after that disease ceased to be a threat? Wealthy people in New Orleans, Olivarius said in an email, kept up with their seasonal migrations: “The rich would still leave town at the beginning of summer and come back in the early autumn, well into the 20th century.” Their business schedules and social lives had been organized around the possibility of warm-weather epidemics, and the habit persisted after yellow fever became a bad memory. “Plus,” she wrote, “New Orleans is just hot in the summer, so it made sense.” The more meaningful hangover from yellow fever, she thought, was political. “I think that the legacies of small state thinking, disease denialism, and a libertarian rather than communitarian approach to health are an outcropping from yellow fever epidemics,” she added.