Throughout the COVID lockdown, I often found myself listening to podcasts. In particular, I gravitated towards podcasts that helped ground the pandemic in historical and political context, providing perspective on an uncertain moment. As I listened, it struck me that, no matter what happened in the past—no matter how tumultuous an era, how disruptive a war or plague, how shocking a sudden turn of events—everything that has ever occurred, the immense variety of historical incident, ultimately becomes the same. Everything becomes a story.
This begs the question: what story will we tell about COVID-19? The events of the past year and a half were more than just a story of the emergence and behavior of a virus. It was also a story of the social, economic, scientific, and political context into which the virus emerged, and the intersection of these forces within complex, dynamic systems. Given this complexity, it can be difficult to predict which stories will rise to the surface of the overarching story of the pandemic. Yet it is important for us to try. The stories we tell about health shape how we engage with the present moment to support a better future—or how we fail to do so.
Consider the issue of race in America. For a long time, the story we told about race was distorted, incomplete, often serving to entrench systems of injustice in the present as we failed to come to grips with our history. This had consequences for the COVID moment, as racial health gaps, informed by this history, worsened the crisis. This reflects why the issue of stories is not merely an issue of how we curate our collective memory. It has deeply-felt implications for the present, shaping our capacity to build a healthier world.
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