Five years into the coronavirus pandemic, COVID is mostly discussed in the past tense — as something that happened.
But no event as monumental as COVID simply disappears. The disease forced us to rearrange our society almost overnight. Even though the days of lockdowns and mass death are behind us, a disruption of that magnitude will undoubtedly have a lasting, if not permanent, impact.
America today is simply a different country than it was before COVID arrived, although some aftereffects are difficult to measure. For example, the pandemic has undoubtedly changed American politics, but how much and in what direction is difficult to quantify given all the other factors at play.
More than a million dead and counting
The most important and obvious result of COVID is all the lives it has taken – and continues to take. More than 1.2 million people in the United States have died from COVID-related illnesses since the pandemic began. During the first wave of infections, as many as 15,000 people died every week. A later, even deadlier wave, which began in late 2020, peaked at more than 25,000 weekly deaths. While those days are thankfully behind us, COVID is still killing hundreds of people every week.
Lasting health consequences
The health consequences of the virus obviously go beyond mortality. There have been more than 100 million confirmed cases of COVID in the US, although that figure likely dramatically underestimates the true total. Most people recovered completely, but some did not. Millions of people reported dealing with lingering, in some cases debilitating, effects of long COVID.
In 2024, there were 4 million more Americans with disabilities than five years earlier. Not all of this increase can be directly attributed to COVID, but there has been a significant increase in the number of people reporting cognitive impairment over the past five years.
The way we work
When common areas abruptly became the site of deadly virus transmission, America’s white-collar workforce suddenly had to learn how to do their jobs remotely. Many of them never returned to the office. According to the most recent data available, more than a third of American workers now do some or all of their work from home.
Employers have been trying to lure their employees back to the office for years, but with only limited success. Many home workers enjoy the remote arrangement so much that they would be willing to take a pay cut or even quit to adhere to the arrangement.
In addition to the impact on individual businesses, the rise of remote working has also dealt a huge blow to the commercial real estate sector. By one estimate, office buildings across the country have lost a total of $250 billion in value because so much space remains vacant. Some cities have all but given up on ever filling some of those offices again and have begun the difficult process of converting them into housing.
The way we learn
US schools also closed en masse in the early stages of the pandemic. Unlike remote work, which has had an unclear impact on employee productivity, distance learning has proven to be a poor substitute for in-person learning for most students. The disruptions of the pandemic caused widespread learning loss that remains unresolved five years later. Anger over what many believe are unnecessary or excessively long school closures has contributed to a sharp decline in satisfaction with the country’s schools. In most states, public school enrollment has fallen from pre-pandemic levels.
The closure of schools also served as an impromptu nationwide experiment in homeschooling. While many parents were eager to get their children back in the classroom, millions decided that educating their children at home was the better choice for their families. Homeschooling has a long history in the US, but in recent years it has evolved from its religious roots to become more diverse – both in terms of its structure and the types of families that practice it.
The way we vaccinate
Data from U.S. schools is also one of the best ways to measure another major post-pandemic social trend: increased vaccine skepticism. Anti-vaccine sentiment is nothing new in America. But that view has become increasingly widespread in recent years, as unfounded fears about COVID-19 vaccines appear to have spilled over into a more general distrust of all shots. As the recent measles outbreak in Texas has shown, this shift can have deadly consequences.
The way we look
The film industry in particular was hit hard by the coronavirus. Annual box office revenues fell by $9 billion after theaters across the country were forced to close. Productions also came to a halt, meaning there were fewer releases to lure audiences back to theaters once safety concerns subsided. The sector has made significant progress in recent years, but production and revenues are still well below levels at the start of the pandemic.
With no choice but to find entertainment at home, Americans turned to their TVs, and studios poured billions into streaming platforms to secure their share of the audience. Over the past five years, our relationship to television has fundamentally changed. Traditional cable has shrunk, while streaming services have boomed. Last year, audiences watched 23 million years of streaming content, according to Nielsen. This shift will not only impact the way we enjoy TV, but could also have major implications for the long-term health of the industry.
The way we spend
Beyond any sector, the pandemic has had a lasting effect on the U.S. economy as a whole, but not in the way most expected when the world came to a standstill five years ago. The economy initially nosedived, but quickly recovered – thanks in part to trillions of dollars in stimulus from Congress. By early 2021, the country had not only recouped its pandemic losses, but also surged.
In recent years we have seen steady economic growth, low unemployment, rising wages and record highs in the stock market. But these positive trends have been accompanied by persistently high inflation, which has continued to push up the prices of key consumer goods.
Nowhere has the post-pandemic price spike had more impact than in residential construction. A wave of new remote workers looking for more space and city dwellers moving to less densely populated areas sent demand skyrocketing in a housing market already facing a chronic supply shortage. In just two years, the average sales price of a home in the US has increased by more than $150,000. Price pressure did not only affect homeowners. Tenants are also seeing their housing costs rise substantially. High interest rates have stabilized things to some extent, but housing is still less affordable than it has been in decades.
