We’re already forgetting what 2020 was like

In 2020, signs and social media posts praising essential workers were ubiquitous. Now, you hardly ever hear talk about the people who put themselves at risk to keep the country going during the pandemic. In his book “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed,” sociologist Eric Klinenberg reminds readers not to be so quick to forget how the pandemic changed us and the impacts we’re still dealing with today.

Klinenberg brought this conversation to Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center, where he was joined in a panel discussion by Rochelle Walensky, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Professor I. Glenn Cohen, the faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics; and Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, the John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

“So many things happened so fast in 2020 and it’s been hard for us to grab them all,” Klinenberg said. “We’re in such denial, we’re in a rush to move on, we’re forgetting what it was like to live through that dysfunction, that dysregulation. We’re forgetting about the deaths we incurred.”

Klinenberg’s book flashes between in-depth profiles of individuals across the seven boroughs of New York City and sociological analysis of the pandemic. It explores the inequalities that were exacerbated by the crisis, including for low-income families and kids in the Bronx who struggled to access remote learning or replace the free and reduced school lunches on which they relied.

It also explores the ways in which the pandemic eroded our trust in leaders. In one chapter, Klinenberg tells the story of a family whose daycare didn’t inform them of its reopening out of fear of contracting COVID from the child of an essential worker. In another, he focuses on Daniel Presti, a Staten Island bar owner who refused to close his doors in late 2020. Presti was radicalized after feeling the federal government wasn’t doing enough to protect business owners struggling in the wake of lockdown rules.

“I think one of the issues around trust and distrust that we need to talk more about is we’re living in different information environments, and I think there are growing concerns that vital statistics that we need to make sense of who we are and what’s happening, what might happen next, are becoming harder to trust and control,” Klinenberg said in the panel discussion.

Walensky, who was tasked with making recommendations to protect public health during her CDC tenure, spoke to Klinenberg’s portrayal of the tradeoffs that decision-makers like herself had to make. She remembered a school board meeting in her hometown of Newton, Massachusetts, where a mother said she was being asked to respect coronavirus policies at the cost of her son’s future.

“She said, ‘If my son doesn’t wrestle next semester, he’s not going to college,” Walensky said. “And then all of a sudden, health is just one thing at the table, and there are really other poignant, important considerations that when we are monocular on health and health alone, we are not considering for the long-term health of a society.”

She added that as a public health official, the costs of infectious diseases are always disproportionate to the vulnerable.

“I remember being on CNN at one point, when the president got COVID. And they were talking about all the famous people in the White House … who [were] infected in the Rose Garden, in the Senate. And I thought to myself, and I said out loud, actually, ‘What about the butlers and the workers in the White House who are going home to multigenerational families who, when you say words like isolation and quarantine, you know they have no capacity to do what you’re asking of them?’”

Klinenberg ends his book as he began the talk — urging people not to move on too quickly from a life-changing event.

“Although the calendar has turned,” he writes, “the story of 2020 is far from over, and its potential to move us in different directions is not yet tapped dry.”

Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Science and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.