By Gina Kolata 
The skeletons move across a barren landscape toward the few helpless and
terrified people still living. The scene, imagined in a mid-16th-century
painting, “The Triumph of Death” by Pieter Bruegel the
Elder, illuminated the psychic impact of the bubonic plague.
It was a terror that lingered even as the disease receded, historians
say.
Covid-19’s waves of destruction have inflicted their own kind of despair
on humanity in the 21st century, leaving many to wonder when the
pandemic will end.
“We tend to think of pandemics and epidemics as episodic,” said Allan
Brandt, a historian of science and medicine at Harvard University. “But
we are living in the Covid-19 era, not the Covid-19 crisis. There will
be a lot of changes that are substantial and persistent. We won’t look
back and say, ‘That was a terrible time, but it’s over.’ We will be
dealing with many of the ramifications of Covid-19 for decades, for
decades.”
Especially in the months before the Delta variant became dominant, the
pandemic seemed like it should be nearly over.
“When the vaccines first came out, and we started getting shots in our
own arms, so many of us felt physically and emotionally transformed,”
said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine. “We had a willful desire to translate
that as, ‘The pandemic has ended for me.’”
He added, “It was a willful delusion.”
And that is a lesson from history that is often forgotten, Frank
Snowden, a historian of medicine at Yale University, said: how difficult
it is to declare that a pandemic has ended.
• Dig deeper into the moment.
It may not be over even when physical disease, measured in illness and
mortality, has greatly subsided. It may continue as the economy recovers
and life returns to a semblance of normality. The lingering
psychological shock of having lived in prolonged fear of severe illness,
isolation and painful death takes long to fade.
Red Cross workers in Chicago constructing face masks during the
influenza pandemic in 1918.
Credit...Chicago History Museum, via Getty Images
Some diseases, like the 1918 flu, receded. Others, like the bubonic
plague, remained, smoldering. H.I.V. is still with us, but with drugs to
prevent and treat it. In each case, the trauma for those affected
persisted long after the imminent threat of infection and death had
ebbed.
If nothing else, the Covid-19 virus has humbled experts who once
confidently predicted its course, disregarding the lessons of history.
“What we are living through now is a new cycle of collective dismay,”
Dr. Greene said — a dismay that has grown out of frustration with the
inability to control the virus, fury of the vaccinated at those who
refuse to get the shots and a disillusionment that astoundingly
effective vaccines haven’t yet returned life to normal.
No matter when or how pandemics dwindle, they change people’s sense of
time.
“A pandemic like Covid-19 is a breach of the progressive narrative,”
that medicine is advancing and diseases are being conquered, Dr. Greene
said.
As the pandemic drags on, days merge into each other as time seems to
blur and slow down with no forward momentum.
An 1898 cartoon in Punch magazine favored the Vaccination Act, which
required smallpox inoculation in Britain. Credit...Historical Images
Archive/Alamy
Edward Jenner, the English physician who discovered the first vaccine
for smallpox.
From “The Gallery of Portraits” by Charles Knight, 1837.Credit...World
History Archive/Alamy
In past pandemics, as today, strong anti-science movements hindered
public health and the waning of disease.
As soon as Edward Jenner introduced the first smallpox vaccine in 1798,
posters appeared in England showing humans who had been vaccinated
“sprouting horns and hooves,” Dr. Snowden said.
“In 19th-century Britain, the largest single movement was the
anti-vaccine movement,” he added. And with vaccine resisters holding
out, diseases that should have been tamed persisted.
But the difference between vaccine skeptics and pandemic misinformation
then and now, historians said, is the rise of social media, which
amplifies debates and falsehoods in a truly new way.
With H.I.V., Dr. Brandt said, “there were conspiracy theories and a lot
of misinformation, but it never had a broadcast system like Covid-19.”
Other pandemics, like this one, were hobbled by what Dr. Snowden calls
“overweening hubris,” prideful certainties from experts that add to the
frustrations of understanding how and when it will dwindle away.
With COVID, prominent experts declared at first that masks did not help
prevent infection, only to reverse themselves later. Epidemiologists
confidently published models of how the pandemic would progress and what
it would take to reach herd immunity, only to be proved wrong.
Investigators said the virus was transmitted on surfaces, then later
said that, no, it was spread through tiny droplets in the air. They said
the virus was unlikely to transform in a substantial way, then warned of
the Delta variant’s greater transmissibility.
“We paid a heavy price for that,” Dr. Snowden said. Many people lost
trust in officials amid ever-changing directives and strategies that
weakened the effort to control the virus.
Jonathan Moreno, a historian of science and medicine at the University
of Pennsylvania, said the end of COVID would be analogous to a cancer
that has gone into remission — still there, but not as deadly.
“You are never cured,” he said. “It is always in the background.”
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