A few days ago, I realized we were at about the one-year mark since news of COVID-19 first appeared in the U.S. media. In early 2020, I was following Rod Dreher’s musings on the then-localized foreign epidemic, as well as the wealth of comments below. I was curious to go back and read that commentary, in light of what’s transpired over the last year.

I wasn’t too worried in early February—after all, Wuhan had been locked down, supposedly isolating the pathogen within China. But I did make some preparations: namely, I bought some extra paper products and made sure there were about 30 days of food in the house. In fact, those preparations were for what was then widely considered the worst-case scenario.

January 25, 2020 marked the first time Rod Dreher wrote about COVID-19, and his headline reflected our pre-pandemic mindset: “Everybody Is Kung Flu Fighting.” A debate raged in the comments over whether COVID-19 would become a domestic crisis or whether it was another SARS or Ebola, very dangerous diseases which nonetheless failed to become epidemic in the United States. There were fears of power or water or mail systems going down, recommendations to stock up on food and supplies, and, more presciently, concerns about disrupted supply chains due to the crisis in China. The real alarmists feared we might have a tough and deadly month or two.

Everybody who was then concerned expected a relatively brief, acute crisis. Nobody foresaw the interminable semi-crisis of 2020, the depression to March’s anxiety. While the Wuhan lockdown appeared to mainstream the idea of lockdowns as a public health tool, before March, there was absolutely no intimation among the general public that it could happen here for any length of time.

When the first great book is written about the pandemic, it certainly should investigate the Trump administration’s flat-footed response, all the more lacking because the pandemic was a rather obvious opportunity for Trump to put on both his China-hawk and trade-protectionist hats. But the other piece of the story will be the sudden mainstreaming of the lockdown as a policy tool, something that virtually nobody foresaw more than a couple of weeks before it was implemented here.

On the last day of February 2020, I attended a dinner party, at which we were still making jokes about hand sanitizer shortages. On March 7, my own state of Virginia announced its first COVID-19 case. By the end of the month, the governor had issued a stay-at-home order. And so 2020 became “2020.”