Five years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, COVID is usually discussed in the past tense — as a thing that happened.
But no event as monumental as COVID simply goes away. The disease forced us to rearrange our society nearly overnight. Even though the days of lockdowns and mass death are behind us, disruption of that scale is bound to have a lasting, if not permanent, impact.
America is simply a different country today than it was before COVID arrived, though some of the aftereffects are difficult to measure. The pandemic undoubtedly altered U.S. politics, for example, but how much and in which directions is hard to quantify given all of the other factors at play.
More than a million deaths and counting
The most important and obvious result of COVID is all of the lives that it took — and continues to take. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1.2 million people in the United States have died of COVID-related illnesses. During the first wave of infections, as many as 15,000 people were dying every week. A later, even deadlier wave, that started in late 2020 peaked at more than 25,000 weekly deaths. Though those days are thankfully behind us, COVID is still killing several hundred people every week.
Lasting health impacts
The virus’s health impact goes beyond mortality, of course. There have been more than 100 million confirmed cases of COVID in the U.S., though that figure likely dramatically underestimates the actual total. Most people recovered fully, but some didn’t. Millions reported dealing with lingering, in some cases debilitating, effects of long COVID.
In 2024, there were 4 million more Americans living with a disability than there were five years prior. Not all of that increase can be attributed to COVID directly, but there has been a significant increase in the number of people reporting a cognitive impairment over the past five years.
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The way we work
When communal spaces abruptly became the sites of deadly virus transmission, America’s white collar workforce suddenly had to learn how to do their jobs remotely. A lot of them never came back to the office. According to the most recent available data, more than a third of U.S. workers now do some or all of their work from home.
Employers have been trying to coax their workers back into the office for years now, but with only limited success. Many at-home workers like their remote arrangement so much that they would be willing to take a pay cut or even quit to keep it.
Beyond the impact on individual companies, the rise of remote work has also dealt a massive blow to the commercial real estate industry. According to one estimate, office buildings across the country have lost a total of $250 billion in value because so much space is sitting vacant. Some cities have all but given up on some of those offices ever being filled again and begun the difficult process of trying to convert them into residential housing.
The way we learn
America’s schools also closed en masse in the early stages of the pandemic. Unlike remote work, which has had an unclear impact on worker productivity, distance learning proved to be a poor substitute for in-person instruction for most students. The disruptions of the pandemic caused widespread learning loss that still hasn’t been remedied five years later. Anger over what many feel were unnecessary or excessively long school closures has helped fuel a stark decline in satisfaction with the nation’s schools. The majority of states have seen public school enrollment drop from pre-pandemic levels.
School closures also served as an impromptu nationwide experiment in homeschooling. While many parents were eager to get their children back into the classroom, millions decided that educating their children in their own homes was the better choice for their families. Homeschooling has a long history in the U.S., but in recent years it has evolved from its religious roots to become more diverse — both in its structure and the types of families that practice it.
The way we vaccinate
Data from America’s schools is also one of the best ways of measuring another significant post-pandemic social trend: Increased skepticism of vaccines. Anti-vaccine sentiment is nothing new in America. But that view has become increasingly widespread over the past few years as unfounded fears about COVID-19 vaccines appear to have spilled over into more general distrust of all inoculations. As the recent measles outbreak in Texas has shown, this shift can have deadly consequences.
The way we watch
The film industry was dealt a particularly big blow by the coronavirus. Annual box office revenue fell by $9 billion after theaters throughout the country were forced to shutter. Productions also ground to a halt, meaning there were fewer releases to draw audiences back to the cinema once safety concerns faded away. The industry has made significant progress over the past few years, but its output and earnings are still well below where they were at the start of the pandemic.
With no choice but to seek 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 cratered while streaming services have boomed. Last year, audiences watched 23 million years’ worth of streaming content, according to Nielsen. This shift doesn’t just affect how we enjoy TV, it could have major repercussions on the industry’s long-term health.
The way we spend
Beyond any one industry, the pandemic has had a lasting effect on the U.S. economy as a whole, but not in the way most would have expected when the world ground to a halt five years ago. The economy took a nosedive at first, but rebounded quickly — thanks in part to trillions of dollars in stimulus from Congress. By early 2021, it had not only recovered pandemic losses, but was surging.
The past few years have seen steady economic growth, low unemployment, rising wages and record highs in the stock market. But those positive trends have been paired with stubbornly high inflation that has driven prices of key consumer goods up and up.
Nowhere has the post-pandemic price spike been more impactful than in housing. A surge in newly remote workers looking for more space and city dwellers relocating to less densely populated areas caused demand to skyrocket in a housing market that was already dealing with a chronic supply shortage. In just two years, the average sale price of a home in the U.S. increased by more than $150,000. Price pressure didn’t only impact homeowners. Renters have also seen their housing costs increase substantially. High interest rates have steadied things to a certain extent, but housing is still less affordable than it has been in decades.
