We are living simultaneously in the covid pandemic as an ongoing event, and as its aftermath.
On September 21st of this year, US President Joe Biden remarked to 60 Minutes that “the pandemic is over,” and yet the covid pandemic is still very much ongoing.
As of the most recently available data on the data from the CDC, in the first week of December 2022, 3,115 people died of covid in the US. In the last week, as of this writing, an additional 2,703 people died of covid. This is between 400 and 450 people dying of covid every day.
According to the same data, in the last year 255,361 people have died of covid in the US—a quarter of a million people, and more than two and a half full “Incalculable Losses,” to borrow a phrase from the New York Times early in the pandemic.
And this is, obviously, not to mention the many other consequences of covid, among them: long covid, or the more than 10 million children who have been left without a caregiver because of the pandemic.
Since Biden’s statement in September, many have challenged his assertion, and many more have wondered how it is possible that the pandemic can be “over” in the face of the overwhelming figures above. As we have written previously, the answer to this lies in something we have been calling, along with our collaborators on Death Panel, the sociological production of the end of the pandemic.
In other words, there has been a profound social and political process to naturalize the pandemic and its effects.
This piece presents an incomplete timeline of the key moments in US covid normalization throughout 2022. Our aim is to show when and how this normalization occurs; calling out when what’s often presented as a novel insight into covid has much less to do with anything real and much more to do with what we’d like to believe about the pandemic. Or what people in power would like to believe.
A key component of that story is emphasizing that, despite its many assertions to the contrary, the Biden administration has failed to meaningfully combat the pandemic. Instead, they have taken the leading edge in normalizing covid and turning a collective responsibility into a matter of individual risk.
But just because the Biden administration and many in the media want to be done with the pandemic doesn’t mean it’s over. And just because they’ve normalized things like the end of masking, doesn’t mean that these losses can’t be won back.
Left to its own devices, the Biden administration would press for the pandemic to end without so much as passing paid sick leave. For that matter, far from taking this moment to recognize we have a profound unmet need in providing free universal healthcare (or, health communism), the Biden administration is actively about to kick covid vaccines and therapeutics to the private market and stop guaranteeing to pay for them at the federal level.
And while many of the Biden Administration’s worst pandemic offenses were in some ways baked into our existing political economy of health, the fact that it would have absolutely been possible to mobilize for far less death, disability, debility, and immiseration during covid, while still operating under a capitalist political economy, is all the more damning.