How COVID changed America : NPR

Five years ago, James Yu’s life in San Diego was a seamless blend of work and social outings with his colleagues.

“We worked out together, grabbed dinner together, met up after work [for] craft beers together,” he says.

All of that was upended by the COVID-19 pandemic, as people across the U.S. were plunged into unprecedented lockdown conditions.

“I was living alone at the time with no pets. It felt like solitary confinement,” Yu, who’s now 40, says.

Yu, a scientist working in the biotech industry, recalls reading Facebook posts from friends who complained about being stuck at home with their kids and spouse all day. He had the opposite problem, his days full of silence and pacing in his apartment. Yu says he was relieved when his company was deemed an essential industry.

“It was so good to be able to go into work and actually talk to someone in person,” he says. “And after most of the shutdown ended, that isolating experience was also a strong impetus to find a partner who is my now wife.”

Yu’s story is emblematic of how COVID united Americans — to an extent. Faced with a new lethal coronavirus, we shared information and commiserated over lost loved ones and our altered lives. But COVID also divided us. The disease wrought wildly different effects, from mild symptoms to long COVID or death. Deep fractures ruptured along political, cultural and geographic lines, as Americans embraced divergent ideas about how to cope with the pandemic.

“People from California were lobbing insults at the ‘idiots in Florida’ for remaining open,” Yu recalls, citing arguments on social media. “And people from Florida were lobbing insults at the ‘sheep in California’ for willingly following the masking mandates.”

Is the pandemic really “over”?

COVID-19 has killed more than 1.2 million people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death toll began slowing after vaccines emerged in late 2020 — and it has mostly remained at lower rates since early 2022. In recent weeks, the coronavirus was still causing more than 1% of American deaths, the CDC says.

In April 2023, then-President Joe Biden signed a resolution ending the national state of emergency over COVID-19; the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency for COVID weeks later, in May 2023.

“I think we are still recovering from the shock of the pandemic,” Melodye Watson, a clinical social worker in Bowie, Md., tells NPR. There’s a lingering trauma, she says, from people absorbing daily death tolls along with new levels of isolation and enmity over safety precautions.

Among the U.S. public, many still disagree over whether the pandemic is over. A new Gallup poll found that while 59% of Americans believe we’re past the pandemic, 41% do not. Those are the same numbers found in a similar poll last year.

It’s a reminder that as a country, we experienced COVID-19 in a multitude of ways. In response to an NPR request, Yu, Watson and hundreds of other Americans shared their stories about reassessing priorities and finding new pursuits. They also described how the pandemic isolated them, how they found moments of joy — and, in some cases, how long COVID left them debilitated.

We adjusted, uneasily, to shifts in what’s normal

Julie Foote, 38, was teaching overseas with her husband when the pandemic struck. They opted to stay in in Yangon, Myanmar, forming a social bubble with colleagues — and becoming devotees of Dungeons & Dragons, a game she had long been skeptical of. The couple now work in Hanoi, Vietnam, and at each school where they’ve taught, they’ve invited students to play the game along with them.

“It gives students endless opportunities for problem-solving, improv comedy, and art integration,” Foote says.

In Southern California, Mara Rosza, 49, says she found moments of joy at the height of the pandemic — but she also couldn’t relate with “the bread bakers of COVID.”

Rosza was working in a garden center, where she found camaraderie with her coworkers and joy in teaching people how to plant seeds and grow their own vegetables. She says she felt a disconnect between the exhausting work she was doing and stories from friends who were getting unemployment benefits and relatives who were stuck at home.

“My coworkers and I felt unprotected and scared, but we had each other. This was comforting,” she says.

But in contrast, their white-collar customers “seemed to take for granted that we would show up to work while they did not think it was safe for them.”

Others felt similar disconnects and frustration. In Seattle, 31-year-old Pauline M. (who asked that her last name not be used because she’s worried her skepticism about COVID restrictions might lead to retaliation from her employer), says depression and anger outweighed any joy brought by pandemic-safe hobbies. A self-described liberal, she says her skepticism about some pandemic measures sometimes put her at odds with others.

“I left social media, because the snarky-yet-saccharine, holier-than-thou, and rude posts by my supposed political allies on the left jaded me and left me enraged,” she says.

The pandemic brought life changes to Chelsea Lloyd, a microbiology professor at Parkland College, a community college in Champaign, Ill. She got married at home, in a small ceremony. She says the pandemic also changed life on her school’s campus, making it harder to form a sense of community, and to socialize with people informally.

Lloyd says she’s noticed more burnout among her colleagues. She says fewer students are entering health professions, adding that those careers “got hammered so hard during the pandemic.”

Americans’ views on the pandemic became increasingly linked to politics

Lloyd says that in general, “I feel there is more mistrust of science now and more political division. Science and expertise have become politicized.”

A recent Pew study agrees.

For the first weeks after the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, most Americans shared a widespread sense that public health officials were doing “an excellent or good job,” despite some confusion about the coronavirus, according to Alec Tyson, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, as he describes the Pew findings on NPR’s Here & Now.

But a stark divide began to emerge between Republicans and Democrats, Tyson says. Five years later, the rift remains prevalent.

“In some ways the national reaction has really been made up of two competing viewpoints: one more commonly held by Democrats that the health threat is high, it’s severe, and generally supportive of restrictions and actions,” Tyson says, “and another viewpoint more commonly held by Republicans that, well, there is a health threat, it may not be the most intense threat and there are mixed views or less support for some of the restrictions.”

He notes that Americans still don’t agree on pandemic measures such as lockdowns and requirements for masks and vaccines.

“Fewer than half say [the restrictions] were about right — 44%,” Tyson says. “From there, 38% say they should have been fewer, while 18% say there should have been more.”

The U.S. political landscape was marked by polarization and fragmented viewpoints before COVID. But the pandemic thrust many of those differences into the public sphere.

Foote, who has been teaching overseas, says that when she comes home now, she finds a changed America.

“The biggest difference,” she says, “is how confrontational Americans have become. I have never been anywhere else in the world where people feel entitled to be verbally abusive or physically aggressive towards complete strangers. I lived in the U.S. for 33 years without ever experiencing unprovoked aggression, but I’ve been on the receiving end of it twice in my visits post-COVID. It’s really alarming.”