For historians, who write stories in order to account for change over time, the problem of assigning these causes and consequences arrives as a problem of narrative. Therefore, often the most important analytical decision a historian has to make is where to begin. Consider the stakes of this seemingly simple question: When did the history of the Covid-19 pandemic start?
It might seem obvious to begin an account of the pandemic in November 2019 in a market in Wuhan, China. A novel coronavirus, which first developed in a bat, was transmitted to some other animal, perhaps a pangolin, which was sold in the market, and then jumped from the animal to a human. That person soon became sick, but not before transmitting the virus to several others. By the end of December 2019, dozens of people suffering from the same virus had been admitted to hospitals. On January 7, doctors in China identified the new strain of coronavirus. Four days later, on January 11, China reported the death of a 61-year-old man who had visited the market in Wuhan. It was the first death attributed to the disease we now call Covid-19. By January 20, there were confirmed cases in China, Thailand, Japan, and Korea.
The trouble is, starting the story this way—foregrounding a cunning virus and a Chinese public health apparatus unable to contain it—does nothing to account for the virus’s unequal impacts. Six months later, in June 2020, fewer than 5,000 Chinese people had died from Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), compared to more than 100,000 Americans. This evidence suggests that a more salient place to start could be with US politics.
So, consider an alternate beginning: In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. Once in office, he disregarded pandemic response plans developed by the previous administration and alienated or dismissed technical experts across the executive branch. In May 2018, for example, he disbanded the National Security Council’s Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit. That is one reason why, in late 2019, as evidence mounted that a dangerous new virus was spreading across Asia, the White House ignored the threat. Even as cases appeared in the United States, the White House proved unable or uninterested in providing the materials necessary to trace and contain the virus’s spread. On March 10, with more than 700 confirmed cases in the United States, Trump continued to tell Americans, “it will go away.”. By the end of that month, the WHO reported the conservative estimate that nearly 3,000 Americans had died from the coronavirus. And the toll continued to rise.
In this second version of the story, the protagonist and causal agent is Donald Trump. The virus appears as a problem that could have been solved within the United States, had the White House taken appropriate action. But, if this beginning answers some questions about distinctions among national experiences with the coronavirus, it raises others: Why was Donald Trump elected? What gave legitimacy to his disregard for an obvious public health crisis? How could a nation often regarded as the strongest in world history prove so impotent?
To answer these questions, a historian is tempted to venture ever further back in time. The history of the pandemic might reasonably begin in 2001, when President George W. Bush prioritized antiterrorism efforts at the expense of other kinds of national security and emergency response. It could begin in the 1860s, when the Union Army’s pursuit of emancipation for enslaved African Americans delegitimized the federal government in the minds of many white people. It could begin in 1492, with the imperial encounter between the Americas and Europe, at the start of the biological process described as the Columbian Exchange. Or the history of this pandemic might begin with the fourteenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague and the strategy of isolating infected people for 40 days that bequeathed us the word “quarantine.”