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Americans may feel like they’re reliving 2020, with a general election rematch set for 2024. But while the politicians’ faces are the same, life is much different.
On March 13, 2020, then-President Donald Trump declared a national emergency for the Covid-19 pandemic.
No one knew at the time exactly how much life was about to change. Reading CNN’s coverage from that era, however, is like transporting oneself back to the time that so many people have either forgotten or want to block out. We had no idea what was coming.
But it’s equally remarkable, precisely four years later, how Covid-19 has both changed American life and also faded to the background.
Lockdowns, face masks and the question of whether kids should be in the classroom were daily, top-of-mind issues that had very real impacts on how people voted in 2020. The special measures states took to ensure that more people could vote during the pandemic formed the basis of the conspiracy theories by which Trump today refuses to believe he lost back then.
Nearly 1.2 million people in the US have died from Covid-19 during the past four years, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While mass outbreaks and hospitalizations appear to be over, there were still at least 500 people who died of Covid-19 per week as of the week ending March 2. In January of this year, more than 2,000 Americans died of Covid-19 each week.
The US government acknowledges spending about $4.4 trillion to address Covid-19, a shocking figure in hindsight that spiked the national debt.
That doesn’t count the trillions in extraordinary measures undertaken by the Federal Reserve,…
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