Covid-19 is the best documented pandemic in history. From the moment it became clear that the coronavirus would trigger a series of global lockdowns, every twist and turn in the pandemic has been chronicled in blogs, diaries and by print and digital media.
The desire to historicise the event has been just as urgent. As early as March 2020, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer Thomas Friedman declared that Covid-19 was “our new historical divide” and predicted that henceforth there would be “BC”, the time Before Corona, and “AC”, the time After Corona.
Today that periodisation looks increasingly questionable. This is especially the case given the other crises that have coincided with or superseded the pandemic, from Brexit to the energy crisis to the war in Ukraine. Indeed, as in 1918, when a war in Europe overshadowed the Spanish flu pandemic, Covid-19 may well turn out to be a footnote in a much bigger and more far-reaching polycrisis.
It takes a brave writer, then, to attempt what his publisher calls “the first full-scale history” of the pandemic, just two years on from Boris Johnson’s declaration of “freedom” from the coronavirus restrictions. But that is exactly what David Vincent, a former pro-vice-chancellor at the Open University, has done. Drawing on research reports, official data and personal testimonies, including previously unpublished diaries from the Mass Observation study, Vincent has written a granular social history of the pandemic that isn’t afraid to engage with the present.
Vincent’s journey began in March 2020 when he was invited to record his thoughts and impressions for a blog. As for many of us during those now half-remembered lockdown days, the daily discipline of setting down his thoughts became a way of making sense of an experience unprecedented in modern times – what Vincent calls “the sheer otherness of an essentially medieval event of plague”. In search of meaning, Vincent returned to A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe’s post hoc account of the bubonic plague that visited London in 1665 (he was just five at the time) and where a stray breath could prove similarly fatal. Vincent also draws parallels with earlier Tudor plagues where, as Shakespeare put it, people were also “cabined, cribb’d, confined”.
Vincent was not the only person to sense the urgency of the moment: “I want this diary to matter to future historians of our times,” wrote one Mass Observation contributor. But, as Vincent observes, lockdown meant different things to different people. For some, it was a miserable experience that underlined their straitened economic circumstances and the depth of their social isolation. By contrast, for those with access to spare rooms and a reliable internet connection, it was an opportunity to Zoom and take up new hobbies. Others got in touch with nature and connected with neighbours, many for the first time. “There was a sense of discovery about who lived only a few yards away,” writes Vincent.
But for every person who craved connection, there was another who wanted nothing more than to be left alone. “I’m constantly surrounded by people,” complained a witness for the Covid Realities, a research project that examined the experiences of parents and carers on low incomes. “It feels like we are living in Groundhog Day and I can’t see a way out.” In a similar vein, the novelist Ian McEwan complained of an existence where “bleached of events… time compresses and collapses in on itself”.
This presents a particular challenge for social history, a discipline rooted in a deep engagement with time and work – the novel, Vincent acknowledges, may be better equipped to capture Covid’s peculiar warping of the present. But like Defoe, Vincent has an eye for telling details.
The Fatal Breath opens with a description of the national Covid memorial wall on Albert Embankment, the crowd-sourced shrine directly opposite parliament inscribed with a heart for each of the 220,000 British dead. Comparing the deaths recorded on the Portland stone wall to “2,000 Grenfell towers”, Vincent reminds us of the sheer scale of the mortality and the extent of people’s suffering. The faster a life is ended, the longer it takes the bereaved to come to terms with their loss, particularly as many were unable to attend the bedside of loved ones and funerals were prohibited.
For this reason, Vincent argues, the depth of psychological suffering is likely to persist long after Covid has become an endemic, manageable illness. What is harder to discern at this juncture are the pandemic’s wider effects on society and culture. Though nearly 7 million people perished from Covid-19 globally, according to the World Health Organization, Vincent writes that the coronavirus pandemic is “a pale reflection of earlier tragedies” (for example, the 1918-20 Spanish flu killed more than 17 million globally – equivalent to about 80 million today).
Nor is it clear that the pandemic will result in a “Great Reset” in living and working conditions. On the contrary, as memories of lockdown – and with it the vision of a better world – have faded, so we have seen a resumption of the neoliberal project and a return to the status quo ante.
If I have one criticism of Vincent’s book it is that he can be too even-handed: the national Covid memorial wall is more than a representation of the scale of our collective losses; it is a reminder of the blunders of the politicians on the opposite bank of the Thames and the ghosts of Covid who haunt our bitterly divided political culture. It will take more histories to remind us of the consequences of those losses and who is to blame.
• The Fatal Breath: Covid-19 and Society in Britain by David Vincent is published by Polity (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
