Washington Post In the early days, the virus posed a graver threat to people and the health care system, Trump embraced lockdowns he now blasts, and the benefits of vaccines were oversold. Unlike in a hurricane or war zone, much of covid’s toll happened out of public view, inside the crowded hospitals where people died on ventilators, often without families by their side in the early months. Frustration built among millions of Americans who were largely stuck at home and required to wear masks at stores as kids learned via Zoom because of an invisible threat. Glimpses came through in the haunting stream of ambulances in empty New York City streets or images of overflowing morgues.
“These are traumatic experiences, and in many ways the ways we deal with it is to forget and move on,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, a physician-scientist and senior clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis who treated covid patients and has been extensively researching the long-term consequences of the virus. “A lot of Americans don’t really remember those days, but we lived each one of them.”