"During covid" is a misleading name for "2020" or "the time with the regulations" or "the time when covid deaths were in the news a lot".

Renewable Sexcellence

@unchartedworlds Especially since we know what works to protect people against COVID and other respiratory diseases - ventilation and filtration.

Make ~5 Air Changes Per Hour mandatory in places where people mix and spend a lot of time together - schools, offices, pubs, restaurants - and COVID (and Long COVID) would become vanishingly rare.

It's not expensive or difficult to do, and doesn't require people to change behaviour.

Kim

@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz I tend to use "back when people cared about COVID"

Willow 🏳️‍⚧️🏴🇵🇸

@unchartedworlds feels very much like this.

Matt Hodgkinson

@unchartedworlds COVID is still with us, but there is a real distinction between the early pandemic and now. The excess mortality in the first and second waves was very high, but after widespread vaccination and exposure (and the deaths of the most vulnerable) the level of excess mortality is now equivalent to winter influenza peaks. Here's figures for European countries, 2020-2023:
Nørgaard, S.K., Nielsen, J., Schjørring, C.B. et al. Excess mortality in Europe estimated by EuroMOMO during the COVID-19 pandemic and previous influenza seasons. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67981-1

I wish people and governments took all respiratory illness more seriously, especially because of its long-term effects (I still mask in public when I can and I isolate when ill), but this does help explain why people see a difference between then and now. The level of illness and death is more "normal", even though normalising tens of thousands of deaths of flu - or COVID - a year is terrible.

yosh

@mattjhodgkinson @unchartedworlds

Death is not the only measure worth considering, quality of life is right there as well. For example long covid has now overtaken asthma as the most common chronic illness in children:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2834486

Economics: record leave of absence was (very likely) responsible for Germany tipping into a recession in 2023: https://www.barrons.com/news/germany-s-economy-ails-as-sick-leave-hurts-output-087dcc0e

And every covid infection does lasting damage to your body: https://www.panaccindex.info/p/what-covid-19-does-to-the-body-fifth

cognitively accessible math

@unchartedworlds I say "During Covid Lockdown" or "when everybody was staying home because of Covid"

Jennifer Moore 😷

@whangdoodler

Indeed!

viq

@yosh
As a healthy teenager I got flu. I had high fever, but nothing remotely requiring hospitalisation. End of story? Nope. It gave me type 1 diabetes. I'll spare you bitching about how much effort and care and *money* goes into managing that. What I will say is that you can catch COVID much more easily, much more often, and each time has a much higher chance of leaving you with something even more interesting than diabetes.
@mattjhodgkinson @unchartedworlds

David Mitchell :CApride:

@kim @unchartedworlds

I usually say some variation/combination of:

Early in the pandemic
At the height of restrictions/precautions
When most people were still <insert health precaution here>
occasionally something like: When people still managed risk
becoming more apropos recently: Before the government turned on us

Jennifer Moore 😷

@mattjhodgkinson

Yes, it really is a different phase now, and I do think of the vaccine as a turning point. The diminishing level of deaths and acute emergencies when the vaccines arrived was significant - and overall a victory for science, even though the vaccines weren't perfect.

But as you say, there are "long-term effects" to consider as well, and that's where the pressures of cultural denial have been active. I'm not saying _you're_ intentionally playing it down, but to treat death rates as a good measure of covid's present-day significance is to inherit that framework. Measuring the incidence of Long Covid, or the common illnesses which covid makes more likely, or just "time off sick", would be more revealing of the ongoing current health burden.

(Thinking of it as a "respiratory illness" is arguably also congruent with a minimisation framework. I think it's more accurate to describe it as a systemic illness, caught via a respiratory route.)

The Doctor

@unchartedworlds Who didn't profit from it?

Ben Lubar (any pronouns)

@unchartedworlds this year is the seventh time it's been 2020 in a row