The Early Days of the Pandemic Are Already Being Memory-Holed

At least Rudy Gobert and Tom Hanks are happy about it.

Rudy Gobert is a fantastic basketball player, an all-NBA selection and likely a future member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, but that is not how I thought he’d ever be remembered. On March 9, 2020, Gobert, at the first press conference after the NBA imposed social distancing guidelines for reporters, mockingly touched every microphone on the dais, letting everybody know he wasn’t scared of no virus.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought Gobert got a bad rap for this. What he was trying to do was show solidarity with the reporters, who were upset at the time that they were being treated like infectious invaders. And besides: How seriously were you taking Covid-19 on March 9, 2020?

The minute you started taking it seriously was two days later, when Gobert — in the ultimate irony — tested positive for Covid-19 just minutes before the Utah Jazz’s game against Oklahoma City, leading the game to be canceled, the league to be shut down and have the entire country, all at once, go “Holy shit.” That was also the same night of then-President Trump’s very-not-reassuring Oval Office address about the coronavirus. It was the night we all started taking Covid-19 seriously. It was the night we realized it was here.

I thought this would be what Gobert would be known for forever. But this week, the Jazz traded Gobert, in a massive deal, to the Minnesota Timberwolves for a bunch of players and future draft picks. It’s the biggest trade in the NBA in years, and Gobert is right at the center of it. You would think that this would lead to a series of mic-touching jokes, or maybe some “at least we know he’s already had Covid!” jabs. But hardly anyone has mentioned it. On his fantastic podcast, ESPN’s Zach Lowe had a detailed rundown of the trade but didn’t bring up Gobert’s unique place in American history even once. The ESPN story didn’t mention it; neither did CBS’; neither did, even, Defector’s. I thought Gobert’s ultimate Hall of Fame induction would be overshadowed by Covid-19. Turns out, he got traded two years later and no one said a word.

This may be the way things are going. The early days of the pandemic were so disorienting and so confusing — and we’ve all gone on so many of our own private and public journeys with the virus and its societal effects since March 2020 — that I wonder if we’re going to memory hole all of those early days. The story of Covid-19 has had so many different chapters since then, taken so many dramatic twists and turns (or variants, if you will), that the characters in the early moments of it have already faded. Do you remember a time when you had no idea who Dr. Anthony Fauci was? That time ended shortly after Gobert touched all those microphones. But it seems like a billion years ago, doesn’t it? It seems like the Before Time. And it’s hard to remember the Before Time.

An even better example of this? Last week, Baz Luhrmann’s movie Elvis hit theaters, starring a terrific Austin Butler as Elvis and a less-terrific Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker. The movie has led to all sorts of discussions, about Elvis, about Luhrmann, about biopics, even about some of Hanks’ choices in movie roles. But one thing that has barely come up? That this was the movie that Hanks was filming when he became the most famous person on the planet to test positive for Covid-19, on that very night of March 11.

That was the reason anyone cared about that movie, the reason Hanks was in Australia, the reason he tested positive. Hanks, in many ways, became the public face of Covid-19 for a while. His recovery was proof that you could make it through, that you had to be safe, but if you got Covid-19, well, maybe you’d make it out like Tom Hanks did. Even his stint hosting the first “Saturday Night Live” after Covid hit, a month later, was structured specifically for Hanks to host — to show that he was OK.

Heck, this even led to a great joke in the Borat sequel, in which Borat realizes that he is responsible for bringing Covid-19 to the world, including a chance encounter with Hanks.

But almost most no one mentioned Hanks’ Covid-19 diagnosis on the set of Elvis when the movie came out last week. It was just a regular movie, and a regular Tom Hanks performance. We no longer associate Hanks with Covid-19 the way we did, vividly, just two years ago. (That cameo will likely make no sense in five years; will people even understand why Hanks shows up and why it was so funny?) We’ve just moved on. We’ve dropped those plotlines all together.

A lot has happened since March 2020. And part of the cost of that is that all the things that happened then, that I thought would be a part of history forever, have already been forgotten. I thought March 11, 2020 would live forever. It didn’t even make it to summer two years later.

Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.