The New York Times, Siddhartha Mukherje*, 10 March 2025

Opinion

Covid’s Deadliest Effect Took Five Years to Appear

We have metabolized a global trauma — millions of deaths, nations brought to their knees, a generation scarred by grief, isolation and loss — so rapidly that it seems, at times, not to have happened at all.

February 2025. A blustery morning. I alight, a little breathless, from the subway at 168th Street and walk the oddly deserted blocks toward the hospital where I work. I hear a distant cough. A windblown plastic bag tumbles along the sidewalk and lodges itself in the skeletal branches of a tree. The familiar, insistent whine of an ambulance rises in the distance.

It has been five years since the world was blown into the tumult of a lethal pandemic. Back then, deserted streets and distant coughs, to say nothing of ambulances docking into hospitals, would have carried a very different meaning. But as Proust wrote, the moments of the past do not remain still. We have metabolized a global trauma — millions of deaths, nations brought to their knees, a generation scarred by grief, isolation and loss — so rapidly that it seems, at times, not to have happened at all.

*Dr. Mukherjee, a physician and scientist, is the author of “The Emperor of All Maladies” and “The Song of the Cell.”