COVID-19 After One Year: What Will the Future Bring?

Think back over the Year of COVID: what images strike in your mind?

Correspondent Martha Teichner asked six prominent public figures to remember and reflect.

“Just empty cities across the world,” said urban studies theorist Richard Florida.

“Broadway, just empty,” said “Hamilton” star Renée Elise Goldsberry.

“Store after store, first closing, and then shutting down,” said economist Laura Tyson.

Civil rights advocate Mary Frances Berry said, “People are parked day, after day, after day.”

“Masks, so that’d be number one,” said psychologist Steven Pinker. “Number two would be the Zoom checker box.”

Chef José Andrés said, “Americans in hunger lines, in food lines, sometimes for hours.”

For Teichner, the snapshot is of lines – food lines, and the lines to sign up for unemployment … the lines to be tested for coronavirus, then to vote … and now, a year into the pandemic, to be vaccinated. 

What, she asked, has this done to us as a nation psychologically? 

“The honest answer is that we really don’t know,” said Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, “because humans are so complex and have so many ways of adapting.”

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