Originally published in The American Conservative.

Pandemics have a way of falling out of historical memory. President George W. Bush read historian John Barry’s book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History over vacation at his Crawford ranch in 2004; when he got back to Washington, he commissioned a national pandemic preparedness plan, the first in our history, at an eventual cost of over $7 billion. The reason Bush was so affected by this book about the Spanish Flu of 1918–20 is that he never knew anything about it before. Fifty million people died in that pandemic. Up to 4 million died in the Asian flu pandemic of 1957–58, including 116,000 Americans; 4 million people and 100,000 Americans in the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968. But these events don’t offer much in the way of lessons or narratives, so they become footnotes.

That is not what will happen to Covid-19. The lockdowns were a major event in world history. Nothing like it has ever happened before, and nothing will be the same after it. With most pandemics, after you have mourned the dead, there is not much more to say about them. There is a lot to say about Covid-19.

Read the rest at The American Conservative.