How COVID Changed Us All: A Conversation with Eric Klinenberg

COVID-19 spread throughout the world — and New York City — in 2020, causing massive disruption to societies, institutions and governments and leaving tens of millions dead and disabled. Because the virus is now considered endemic (part of everyday life), public health experts like me recommend using proven tools, such as vaccines, drugs, masks and ventilation to keep people healthy. But what is the therapy for the civic sickness that the pandemic also caused? In his new book, “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed,” sociologist Eric Klinenberg explores what brought us to a different type of long COVID, “a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust.” 

Klinenberg does this through a unique and powerful combination of sociological analysis and narrative, exploring the lives of New Yorkers who experienced the pandemic and reacted to it in different ways. 

Klinenberg’s approach is both rigorous and empathic, seeking to explore how individual perspectives and cultural forces shaped how people responded then and now to COVID. 

I recently talked with Klinenberg about his book and what it means for the future of politics, health, cities and society. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Jay Varma: You’ve described this book as a social autopsy of the year 2020. You referenced using the year 2020 as a title, both as a reference to the calendar year and also as an allusion to looking at something with clarity and acuity. What made you focus on 2020 as opposed to the past three years of COVID-19?

Eric Klinenberg: I think 2020 was an especially powerful and formative moment in the same way that we sometimes think we develop as people from all of our experiences, but there’s something especially formative about early experiences. I think that’s true for this crisis as well. 2020, it seems to me, was not just a single crisis, it was a series of cascading crises. The pandemic, the assault on democracy, the murder of George Floyd, the spike in violence, the abandonment of cities. We really went through a lot, and it’s my view that we were traumatized. Again, some of us as adults get through our traumas by repressing them. There’s this great sociological concept called “the will not to know.” I think we’ve repressed what we went through in 2020. To our collective detriment, we’ve repressed it because so much happened to us that changed us. I’ve just written this essay about the fact that long COVID is not just a medical condition, it’s also a social disease. I think there are all kinds of signs that we’re still suffering from it today.

JV: You highlight this challenge of dire yet distant threats a lot at the very beginning of your book, how a principal in Chinatown is already hearing about the dangers through the families in their school. I’m curious about how you think of dire yet distant threats now compared to then.

EK: One of the first ideas in the book actually comes from something I was teaching at the time. I’m a sociologist; I teach at New York University. In the early days of the pandemic, as it happened, I was teaching a course on the social challenges of climate change. It’s a big lecture course I teach often, and I generally talk early in the course about this thing social scientists call “the paradox of cognition.” The paradox is that it’s very difficult for us to get excited and exercised by threats that might be existential and profound, but are a little bit remote, more remote than the car that’s about to hit us or the guys across the street carrying a baseball bat or the spike in crime or immigration or what have you. Climate change really suffers from this problem. It always feels like it’s this major issue, but not today. It’s not the most important thing for me today. By the time it becomes the most urgent thing on our minds, it would probably be too late to do anything significant about it. 

When I brought up this subject in class, I asked people in January, February 2020, for example, how many of you are concerned about this new coronavirus that they found in China? When I first asked that question, what came back to me were 50 blank stares and one student who raised his hand. I asked him how he knew about it, and it turned out he was Chinese. Not Chinese-American, he literally had just gotten off a plane from China, somehow was one of the first people to get out, he’d come to New York to do study abroad. 

I kept asking that question over the course of the next several weeks and gradually more people raised their hands until it was the only thing happening to us, and in fact, it was such an urgent thing that the school closed, our economy closed, people had to go back home. Obviously, our lives changed in profound ways. 

I think the pandemic was a very hard thing for us to get our heads around for a very long time. It took a while for it to register. We refused to accept it, and unfortunately, one of the chief people who suffered from that delusion was the president of the United States at the time, which made it much more difficult to respond.

JV: This is actually what has been, for me, one of the most challenging things to reflect on. Not so much the public reaction, because I’ve been used to that in my work in public health, but I can tell you from my own experience, I spent a lot of time in the 2000s working overseas trying to help countries with pandemic preparedness plans. One of the things we never practiced is what happens if the president or prime minister refuses to believe this is a problem.

EK: At the very beginning of the book, I write about this amazing story where there’s a company called Princess Cruises. Within a few weeks of each other, in the beginning of 2020, the Diamond Princess left port in Tokyo and the Grand Princess left port in San Francisco, and a few days after they left, passengers got COVID on both ships. In Japan, they turned the ship around. They brought the ship back into the harbor. They sent a bunch of epidemiologists on board. They quarantined. They explained to everyone on board what was happening and why they were being quarantined. They did a bunch of research to try to figure out how the disease was spreading. They carefully brought people back onto land and got people treated when they needed to be treated. It was hard and they messed up some stuff, but they learned a tremendous amount from that experience.

For instance, they learned about the fact that you could be an asymptomatic carrier. They learned that air circulation really mattered. These were some big things that affected Japan’s policymaking from then on, and Japan shared that with the world. Japan, by the way, is one of those countries that had just tremendous performance in terms of its public health. It started taking the pandemic seriously on day one. 

Many of you might remember what happened in the U.S. The president refused to let the ship come back into the port. This is where he says, “I like the numbers where they are,” and goes on to say something like, “this thing is just going to go away.” For a while, they don’t let the ship come back, even with Americans on it. Then fascinatingly, they say it can come back, but it’s not going to San Francisco, where it was supposed to come. They send it to Oakland. 

I used to live in Oakland. There’s a symbolism that matters here. San Francisco is this gem of a city, it’s affluent, it’s more white. Black Oakland is stigmatized in the American imagination for being a working-class minority city. Then what happens is that they don’t really tell people on the ship exactly what they’re doing. The quarantine is not executed very well. They don’t learn a lot from what’s going on. They put people on buses and bring them to military bases where they’re supposed to be tested and examined, and a bunch of people refuse to be tested and refuse to quarantine. They just leave, like, “I’m American, you can’t hold me here.”

We have no idea how many people spread COVID because of that. 

JV: You describe an event known as “the Cummings effect” in the UK, which is almost a controlled trial demonstrating that how public officials behave impacts individual behavior, and how that then transcends to population effects.

EK: It’s an amazing case, and I think in the book, I really try to leverage these comparisons across places so that we can make sense of how the disease played out. It’s so clear that the virus is one big cause of the disease, but there’s all this social and political stuff that really shapes our experiences. The Cummings effect refers to a British official who refused to respect the lockdown order that the government had imposed on the population and was caught traveling with his family when the demand from the government was that everyone else stay home.

When that trust was violated, other people said, “Well, why should I respect these rules and guidelines?”

I think these kinds of actions from political officials violating their own rules completely undermine the capacity for solidarity in the populations they’re serving.

JV: It’s yet another example to me of how in public health, if you get a bunch of technocrats in the room, they need the input of people from other backgrounds who understand how society functions, how marketing and communications work, and how politics work to achieve the effect they want.

EK: That’s completely right. I think we failed to recognize just how difficult it is to share expert knowledge in a way that seems credible and manageable. I think we had a problem of expertise, in this country and around the world, when people struggled to communicate how much uncertainty there was in our response and how our policies would have to change as we learned more about this new disease. 

I think the biggest problem from the beginning was the WHO advising people and states not to wear masks, not to require masks. This was a controversial call. To some, it was a sign that the Chinese were trying to play down the significance of the threat and were using their muscle to lobby the WHO into a policy that didn’t make sense given what we know about coronaviruses. To others, it reflected too much concern about the possibility that masks would run out and that people in medical institutions wouldn’t have the ability to secure them or procure them if they recommended them.

It took months for the science to come in as clearly as it could on the specific case of this new coronavirus and COVID. When they finally got it, they switched their message, but by then, a lot of people had spent months hearing that they didn’t need to wear a mask. 

In the countries that had been affected by SARS in 2003, there was a high uptick in people using masks from the get-go. They didn’t need that special messaging. They had learned the hard way. But in the U.S., much of Latin America and much of Europe not as affected by SARS and where mask-wearing is not part of routine public health, people really resisted, and it was much more difficult to get people to do it given the communications failure, I think.

The big takeaway here is that you can’t just start mandating masks in the pandemic and expect it’s going to work. You can’t build the plane while you’re flying it.

JV: I want to talk about the mask example a little bit, because this has everything to do with our successes and failures.

I was one of the handful of representatives from the African continent at the first global coronavirus meeting in Geneva in early February. I was assigned to the infection control committee, which was almost entirely staffed by academic experts from around the world who work in healthcare facilities. The first and most important discussion was, “What do we recommend for healthcare workers?” I was one of the people who asked, “Well, isn’t recommending cloth masks or any type of face covering at least better than nothing? Shouldn’t we at least give people something to do while we work out this uncertainty?” 

But there are really two cognitive problems. One was what I call the anchor of certainty, this need to say that we’re only going to recommend masks if we know that they guarantee protection in everybody who uses them. We don’t wear seatbelts because they’re 100% effective, we wear them because they’re partially effective. 

That was one problem. The second problem was this supply constraint issue and wrapping up an issue about supplies into an issue about public recommendations. 

Maybe the third issue, I guess, is the one you pointed out, which is just the hubris or the narrow-mindedness of people who only work in hospitals not understanding how the social messaging might be damaged by this.

EK: That’s all right. It’s amazing to me to this day, the skepticism people have about masks working. What I generally say is, if you think masks don’t work, find some healthcare workers and ask them about the death and disease among the medical workers in their hospitals when they had masks. Because when hospital workers had masks and wore them properly, they worked. It’s actually amazing how much they worked. Masks didn’t work if you had an inappropriate mask like a bandana, and you wore it half the time and sometimes you wore it under your nose. We’ve failed to really figure out how to convey to people how important it was to have the right equipment and to use it well, but we also failed to produce it. Many countries in the world reacted immediately to the news that there was a new coronavirus by ramping up production of masks and finding a way to make sure that everyone in the population got it.

JV: I really liked how you dug into some of the history of East Asia and how the mask became this symbol of modernity and hygiene over the past century, whereas in the U.S., it became a symbol of a muzzle and restricted freedom. When the next respiratory virus pandemic occurs, what is the pathway here in the United States to convince more Americans that masks are a symbol of modernity and hygiene? 

EK: I’m so much better at the social science part than the policy part. I think we are really in a pickle here on public health in the U.S. There are societies on Earth over history that have had great plagues and public health crises, and they’ve responded by shoring up their protection systems, by doing more on the policy side, by putting in better surveillance systems, by coming up with better plans for hospitals and care, by developing vaccines and promoting them in the population, by sharing knowledge about various prevention measures we know, washing hands or things like that. In the U.S., this became so partisan and politicized. Just a few decades ago, Republicans had more trust in scientists and medical doctors than Democrats did, but everything has changed now.

I think getting Americans to wear masks if there’s a bird flu pandemic or some other virus, it’s going to be a very tricky thing because the mask is no longer just a device to keep us healthy. The mask is now a symbol of our identity and our politics. 

JV: Am I willing to do something that is a bit uncomfortable and feels unnatural for the sake of strangers?

EK: You asked at the very beginning of our conversation about this idea of social autopsy, and we let it go a little bit, but let’s bring it back in right now.The idea of social autopsy is that our conventional way of understanding why someone dies is this amazing scientific technique, the autopsy. You open up the body and you find the organs that break down, and by identifying the source of the physiological breakdown, you also can explain death.

It’s my contention that, especially when you’re talking about large-scale events that affect entire populations, it’s not just our physiological condition that determines who lives and who dies. If we want to understand why some nations had higher death rates than others, if we want to understand why some neighborhoods had higher death rates than others, we need to open up the skin of the city or of the country, look into the body politic, and see what it is that makes some places break down and what it is that made other places resilient. 

JV: So much of this is, for me, all about this fundamental philosophical question of how much we owe others and what we do for people, not just our family members, but those who are not our family members. I think we can all agree that probably the biggest sacrifice that was being asked was for young people to sacrifice their education and their jobs on behalf of primarily the elderly and the immunocompromised.

I was thinking about my own teenage kids who’ve often complained about how Boomers don’t seem to care about their cost of student loans or housing costs. But in this situation, the young were told to stay away from each other and stay away from school and sacrifice the important years of their life.You talked to a number of different students across many different socioethnic groups in New York City. What did you learn from your experience?

EK: Well, I think your kids made a very shrewd observation. My daughter was in fifth grade when the pandemic started, and my son was in eighth grade. It was a brutal time in one’s life to be cooped up at home and isolated. There are many costs for young people, but one of them was their mental health. And I think we’re still seeing it to this day, this other version of long COVID I talked about in young people across America — the trauma of that year generated a lot of anxiety and stress. 

We did a huge amount to try to protect the lives of older people and frail people. I don’t have a philosophical problem with that. In fact, I think it’s useful for Americans to know that we never really had a lockdown the way they had lockdowns in other countries. It wasn’t just China where people couldn’t leave their apartments. In France, you could only go out for 30 minutes, 60 minutes a day in a very narrow set of places with a card that gave you the right to do that for specific kinds of exercise. In Italy, people were confined to their homes. In Belize, people were confined to their homes. 

We did make sacrifices, most notably closing down schools, and that’s been the one that people have talked about as the great controversy. 

I think, for me, the question is why haven’t we recognized and acknowledged all the things that young people did to help the rest of us? Why haven’t we said “thank you”? Why haven’t we thought about scholarship programs for colleges? There’s a chapter in the book in which I draw very heavily on interviews with these university students from very different kinds of campuses with very different economic situations, and what you learn in all of them is that they were asked to do a lot and not really appreciated or recognized.

I fear the effect of this is that many young people feel very disenchanted in America now. People in their 20s express far more distrust of core institutions than other people in this country. Also, I think you might see it in the 2024 elections. People in their 20s are saying, “I’m not going to vote.”

JV: You talk about this mechanism of how some people coped by “social pruning,” by cutting off connections, either because others didn’t share their views about COVID or social justice or something else. But, of course, there was June 2020, when many in big cities like New York coped by joining social movements. It seemed like a very natural sociological phenomenon. 

EK: It was a way of speaking back, yeah. It’s a big part of the book, as you know, what happened in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by police. Record numbers of people in the United States and around the world came out to protest, and it was an expression of moral outrage, it was a call for racial justice, but I think there was even more to it than that. I think millions of people had spent months at home locked down, making sacrifices, watching the pandemic play out in ways that were manifestly unjust. 

In sociology, we have this concept called “collective effervescence,” which is about the joy that we experience in collective action that we don’t really get on our own. There’s no collective effervescence when you’re on Zoom or swiping on your phone to read Twitter. There’s this fundamental human need to convene.

The protests became the vehicle for that. It was an amazing outpouring, and it did represent something beautiful during that year. Mutual aid societies did that as well. I think the challenge is that in the moment when it seemed like anything was possible, everything solid had melted into air, everything was up for grabs. 

I think a lot of people got convinced that there would be some kind of transformation, so now, the problem is that there’s a lot of frustration about what we have not been able to do.

JV: I can definitely say from the healthcare and public health perspective, there’s that feeling. People were clapping for us for two or three months. Then, by the winter of 2020, there’s all the truthers online. I think that part of the disillusionment, part of the understaffing that you see in hospitals and public health is a reflection of what you just said, which is that we thought things were going to get better.

EK: Well, I think, for nurses especially, that’s been a really big issue. I actually wrote an article, it came out recently in a social science journal, about moral injury among nurses. In the health field, it’s been framed as a problem of burnout, which is kind of, in my view, putting the responsibility on the workers themselves. Like, “Oh, you didn’t have it in you to persevere through this thing and you burned out. You need to build yourself up.” I think that’s unfair. 

The reality is that we asked health workers to do basically impossible, traumatizing things in horrible conditions, like to take care of too many patients, to be there with people dying alone, to tell families things that seemed impossible to believe.

JV: You say narcissism trumps solidarity. I wonder how much of that enemy persists to this day.

EK: I think that as we saw government fail us at different levels, people who might’ve thought otherwise became convinced, “Well, I better take care of myself,” reducing the unit of our care from the collective to something more personal. 

I want to be clear that I don’t think that’s a universal experience. One of the parts of the book that I enjoyed writing the most was the story of the rise of mutual aid networks, especially in low-income immigrant neighborhoods. What Americans did to help each other get through the pandemic is extraordinary. There’s seven people whose stories I write in great detail in the book. One from every borough of New York, plus an MTA custodian who died early, and also a Black Lives Matter activist.

It’s not all darkness, this experience. There’s something else that happened that was really productive and positive. Actually, you see the legacy today, like the mutual aid networks that started during COVID in New York and around the country that have now transformed and are helping asylum seekers and new migrants acculturate to big cities. That’s something for us to remember and hold onto and channel in the coming year.