You may remember that a pandemic began five years ago, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting. The world moved on.
History is full of examples of societies quickly returning to business as usual after a plague. But history also reveals that the aftershocks of pandemics can linger for far longer than five years. Signs suggest our global economy and politics are suffering their own form of long Covid, and we may still be in the chaos phase of a pandemic cycle. The good news is that if we fully recover, it should feel much better than this.
Pandemics can fundamentally alter the course of history. One of the earliest recorded pandemics was a plague that struck Athens in 430 B.C. The resulting death and disorder contributed to Athens’s defeat in the war against Sparta. The decline of Athenian democracy helped pave the way for the authoritarian utopianism of Plato that influenced political thought for millenniums.
Still, there appears to be a link between the scale of an infectious threat in a country or community and increased support for conformism and authoritarianism. While Covid-19, for all of the needless and tragic deaths, was nothing on the scale of earlier plagues, there’s still evidence of a similar effect.
Global surveys suggest there’s been declining support for representative democracy since the Covid pandemic. In Britain, the proportion of people who viewed it as a very good way to govern was down to 31 percent in 2023 from 43 percent in 2017. In Germany, the figure dropped to 37 percent from 46 percent over the same period. The world appears still in a febrile political period, as incumbents around the globe continue to be ousted from office.
This might be because there’s nothing quite like a pandemic to reveal the raw power of state control: markets and schools shuttered, movement restrained. Government responses to pandemics, both legitimate and misguided, can create lasting mistrust in state authority. During the Great Plague of London, dog massacres did little to reassure people about the efficacy of public health intervention. Contradictory government advice over masks and presidential advocacy for anti-malarial medications may have done something similar for Covid.
Conflicting or confusing advice can help fan lasting skepticism even when authorities advocate more reasonable policies. As cholera spread across Britain in 1831-32, it was accompanied by riots prompted by a widespread belief that the infection was cover for surgeons to obtain bodies to dissect. Two decades later, the British government’s attempt to mandate children’s vaccination against smallpox was met with further riots as mistrust in public medicine festered.
Long after Dr. Anthony Fauci left the federal government under a blizzard of death threats, the proportion of survey respondents saying they had a lot of trust in physicians and hospitals has remained depressed: It fell to 40 percent in January 2024 from 72 percent in April 2020. America’s health system is now overseen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the country’s leading vaccine critics.
The economic impact of outbreaks is often similarly extended. When bubonic plague struck the Roman Empire in the sixth century, it decimated the population and farmland returned to forest. Emperor Justinian complained that his remaining citizens were exploiting the labor shortage for profit, and he imposed wage and price controls. Something similar happened with Covid. Thankfully it wasn’t plague levels of mortality that led to increased prices, but the pandemic did affect recent inflation in some ways, including rising government spending alongside a breakdown in supply chains.
This was compounded by border controls. The collapse in the number of people moving across borders between 2020 and 2022 reduced temporary migration into the United States by about four million people — and many of those temporary migrants would have become permanent additions to the labor force in time.
Research published by the International Monetary Fund suggests that rising wages connected with a tight labor market could be largely responsible for two-thirds of the inflation the United States saw in services prices between the third quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023. Analysis from economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve found that the lack of workers was still adding to inflationary pressures in the last months of 2024.
The influence of the Black Death on labor relations continued for many decades, shaping economic and political arrangements for the long term. The worker shortage in Western Europe led to greater freedom with the decline of bonded labor and serfdom. But in the East, the plague set the course to greater repression — peasants were more closely tied to their lord’s land, semi-enslaved.
We are seeing similar bifurcation today: Some countries, including Germany, embraced migration as a solution to ongoing labor shortages, while others put in place ever tighter immigration limits. There was only an upside to labor scarcity for most people in Western Europe after the plague because the government’s attempts to freeze wages didn’t stick. The same is going to be true of restrictions today. People will only benefit from more opportunity and lower prices if government action to curb migration doesn’t work.
Pandemics can have silver linings in the long run, even if from a God’s-eye view it can take a long time to reach real normalcy. After the Black Death, more women entered the work force — alongside rising wages — and there were knock-on effects from expensive labor, including the technology advance from water-powered fulling mills to sailing ships that could travel farther with smaller crews that led to the age of exploration.
Post-Covid, there are some signs that things could get back to a semblance of normal. Inflation in rich countries fell to 2 percent in 2024 from about 4 percent, and the I.M.F. expects it to stay roughly at that level this year, suggesting interest rates should also come down. (That is assuming we don’t blow that progress in a global trade war and border shutdown.)
Nobody is predicting a roaring second half to the 2020s, but there is an opportunity for considerable improvement. We’re only just back to prepandemic global poverty levels, and there’s a debt crisis in Africa linked to the pandemic aftermath, but this year still might end with a record low proportion of the world living on less than the international poverty line of $2.15 a day.
History shows us we can salvage something from the wreckage of a pandemic if we choose — that is, if we don’t remain befuddled by Covid fog. If we double down on medical mistrust, cut funding for research and global cooperation and continue to turn inward, recovery will be stunted and the impact of a future pandemic could be even worse.
Charles Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the author of “The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.