The COVID-19 pandemic did more than interrupt people’s daily lives and work patterns, according to author Eric Klinenberg. It affected their psyche and even changed their relationship to that most basic act of life, breathing.
“When you breathe, it’s the most fundamental exchange we have, not with each other but with the world,” he said during a recent discussion titled “Five Years Later: A Book Talk on the Events of 2020.” “The thing that was most fundamental to our survival, this very basic act, also became the thing that was most likely to kill us,” he said. “In a way, that kind of reality has made it difficult to process this.”
Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University, examined the psychic and political toll of the pandemic in his book, “2020: One City, Seven People and the Year Everything Changed.” February’s discussion was the first in a yearlong series to mark the 20th anniversary of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics.
As moderator of the Feb. 13 talk, Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen ’02 noted that country has yet to fully process the traumas of that year, during which hundreds of thousands died of COVID.
“2020 was a year when we weren’t gathered together for a lot of it,” she recalled. “As soon as it was over, we pretty much wanted it to be in the rearview mirror. A lot of us never talked about it very much, even though, during it, it was obviously a crisis. So, now we’re in 2025, and lots of people are feeling that it’s [again] a crisis, or about to become one. So, I think it’s very fitting that we’re having this event.”
Klinenberg agreed that the effects of the endless fear and caution of 2020 linger. “Our collective response to what happened here that year has been marked by a will not to know what happened. It’s almost as if it’s too painful to go back there.”
One concern, he said is that the United States “fared so much worse than it seemed poised to do.” Pre-pandemic studies had rated the country as the best-prepared, yet the mortality rate was higher than expected.
One notable failure, he said, was the country’s treatment of “essential workers,” those whose duties were considered so important at the time that they were expected to work during the pandemic.
“How many of you have been talking a lot about essential workers recently?,” he asked to a silent response. Most essential workers — custodians, nurses, janitors, clerks, doctors, meatpackers — were sent into the world with no guaranteed ways to prevent the disease. “So they wound up having much higher incidence of COVID … and significantly higher mortality rates.”
This, he argued, created a “moral obligation” to give these workers special access to healthcare, higher compensation, or at least recognition. “But in the United States, to be called essential was to be deemed expendable.”
The predictable result, he said, is an atmosphere of distrust. “The sense of betrayal that people who took those jobs, went out into the world, brought COVID back into their homes and families, and experienced more suffering and death for that — I think [they] have every reason to feel distrustful, not just of one president or one governor, but of all of us for being so quick to forget.”
Thus, he said, “‘long COVID’ became a social condition as well as a medical one.” He said he predicted, when the book was released last year, that “there was one candidate for office who was going to benefit from that more than anyone else. And I think that’s what’s happened.”
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a former Petrie-Flom Center senior academic fellow, reacted to a story that Klinenberg relayed in his book. The owner of a Staten Island sports bar, who opened it in 2019 but had to close it soon after when COVID hit, lost money on the enterprise, and felt left out of government relief efforts. That led him to become radicalized on the far right. This, Walensky said, was a story that made her angry to read.
“The right thing to do at the time for society was that the bar should be closed,” she said. Most of all, she felt that the owner’s anger was misplaced. “He was mad at the health officials because they were the ones saying the bar should be closed — when in fact, it was society that was failing [him]. It was the economics that didn’t allow him the umbrella or the blanket to catch him, when in fact this was the right thing to do. But he was mad and targeting all his hate towards the health system.”’
I. Glenn Cohen ’03, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center, had a unique perspective on 2020 as he had spent part of the year in Florida caring for his parents, and part in Cambridge — where citizens largely accepted shutdown orders instead of resisting them as many Floridians did.
“I could not imagine two more divergent places to be,” he said. “We had a hyper-compliant group of people here in Cambridge, and a government that was largely leaning into protective measures. In Florida we had a very different kind of approach.” That made him think, he said, “about these differences and how they played out sociologically.”
Gersen was struck by the Cambridge/Florida contrast as well. “That’s a story about intense division in how you see the government, and the theme of trust versus distrust.”
She concurred with Cohen and Klinenberg that the divisions of 2020 helped create the political climate of 2025. “2020 was a key year, possibly the key year, in creating the conditions that got us here — where, as you say, the distrust people are now the ones in charge.”
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