Public health is dead. As artists, we share some of the responsibility

On Feb. 16, a group of “long haulers” protested outside Royal Albert Hall in London, where the British Academy of Film and Television Arts ceremony was about to take place, aiming to raise awareness about the silence surrounding Long Covid in the arts community and the pandemic’s lasting impact on the entertainment industry.

There is a Long Covid crisis in the Arts, read the T-shirts of these disabled performers from the collective Protect the Heart of the Arts, who tried to disrupt the exclusive ceremony with signs and a die-in protest.

As a writer who lived with Long Covid for two years, I support both the statement and the initiative. Today more than ever, I think it is essential for artists to acknowledge and challenge a pandemic-shaped cultural vacuum.

I understand the memory of the pandemic is painful, and personal. For some, like me, it is one of loss and suffering. For the most privileged, the pandemic will be forever associated with the first – and probably last – time they ever had to endure such a drastic suspension of their individual liberties. The rich and powerful are not used to being banned from crossing borders or having to deal with curfews.

But for all of us, the “COVID times” hold a memory of prolonged restrictions and coercive public messaging that hindered our ability to do life as we knew it. The pandemic’s legacy is defined by a sense of immobilizing uncertainty, and by an unresolved grief of worldwide proportions. Over the past five years, COVID-19 has killed more than 7 million people around the world.

Yet, where are the memorials? The commemorative days? The monuments in honour of the frontline workers, scientists, caretakers, who looked death in the eye to make the world go round while the rest of us sheltered in place?

Nowhere to be seen are the memories of our shared trauma.

The more time passes between what people identify as “the end of the pandemic” — in itself a deeply questionable concept – and the present day, the more its memory becomes fragmented, randomized and divisive, leaving the door wide open to revisionism.

The pandemic’s downplayed impact is making silent ripples around the world, with growing anti-science sentiment and public health under attack in North America.

We artists – writers, painters, musicians, movie directors, actors – have a duty of care when it comes to representing the unprecedented times we live through. If the Arts are a reflection of the zeitgeist of their time, it is obvious from the lack of representation of the COVID-19 pandemic that we are experiencing collective amnesia.

Most cultural representations of the pandemic happened in its first two years. Early pandemic art was a testimony to the incredibly fertile ground that these unprecedented times brought forth. Some of the most irreverent, inspired, genre-defining works of the last decade were produced in these first few years.

Bo Burnham’s musical Inside, written in lockdown, is a brilliant example. In the show, the comedian mixes music, theatre and stand-up comedy to document his life and deteriorating mental health in isolation. It is an astonishing and heartfelt mix of comedy and drama, and a powerfully meta statement on many struggles of our times – suicidal ideation, relationships, worker exploitation, toxic masculinity or societal collapse.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, a movie by Rian Johnson released in 2022, also addresses the pandemic early on. As we are introduced to the main cast of characters, we get to see how each of them is dealing with the COVID lockdown mandates – a deliciously gritty criticism of how entitled, privileged people can think they live above the laws. The sense of entitlement of the rich and powerful is a major theme in the movie, whose villain is not-so-slightly inspired by Elon Musk.

Less famous, but probably one of the works of fiction that most boldly addresses the pandemic is the second season of HBO’s original series Betty. Director Crystal Moselle’s choice to depict the pandemic-era NYC and its consequences on her characters’ lives is sensational. The pandemic is not just glanced over but woven into the script, intertwined with issues of gender, race and age to make a solid point about how the pandemic sits at the centre of multiple intersectional questions. Disappointment Media calls the show “an exceptional piece of COVID-19 media.” I can only agree.

Other TV shows released between 2020 and 2022 also featured the pandemic, like Law and Order’s SVU, Greys’ Anatomy, or The Morning Show. However, quickly after the last restrictions were lifted, that it was time to “go back to normal,” representations of the pandemic in the arts and media stopped almost entirely.

Yes, there are a handful of early representations of the COVID-19 pandemic in our mainstream cultural landscape. But, as the world moved on to resume consuming and behaving as if nothing had happened, creators no longer felt obligated to keep the pandemic and its aftermath in their art.

As the world moved on to resume consuming and behaving as if nothing had happened, creators no longer felt obligated to keep the pandemic and its aftermath in their art.

Yet, the world is not the same as when COVID-19 first hit. In fact, it looks nothing like it. It feels darker. Sicker, somehow. I’m not saying this was exclusively caused by the pandemic, but I am convinced that the unwillingness to collectively acknowledge its impact at a societal level eased us all into a state of apathy that increased our tolerance to the unacceptable. The abandonment of vulnerable people is often a breeding ground for the normalization of anti-democratic ideas.

The Arts have not been spared from their share of losses to COVID-19. Acclaimed musician Manu Dibango, Broadway star Nick Cordero, country legend Charley Pride, and famous author Julie Powell all passed away from the virus. The list is long, so I’ll stop there.

David Lynch was pretty open about the threat of COVID stopping him from directing again, seeing as he was at risk of severe complication from the virus – he lived with COPD, a chronic lung disease. Yet, how many people who mourned his passing would be ready to acknowledge that they are part of the problem that prevented this legendary director from making any new art? That we now live in a world that finds it acceptable to exclude the more vulnerable for the sake of going “back to normal?”

Similarly, many artists have started opening up about their struggle with Long Covid, despite the risk to their careers. Acclaimed writer Madeline Miller (Circe, The Song of Achilles), American guitarist Dave Navarro, former member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or actors Tilda Swinton, Colin Farrell, Matt McGorry, Alyssa Milano, Salma Hayek, just to name a few. Even an artist as young as Billie Eilish shared that she needed months to recover after an infection in 2022: “It was bad. (…) I wasn’t gonna die, but that does not take away from how miserable it was. It was terrible. I still have side effects.”

Yet, we’re not talking about the pandemic nearly as much as we should. This lack of self-reflection is bound to come back and bite us, as the climate collapse brings with it the dawn of the Pandemicene.

It is not the first time that a pandemic’s memory has met a similar fate of collective amnesia. Some historians refer to the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918-1920 – commonly known as Spanish flu – as the forgotten pandemic,” one that did not generate much interest from the historians and artists of the time. Yet, it is a truth as old as time that art is a uniquely durable way for humans to pass down important knowledge and testimonies to the next generations. Folklore and cautionary tales, for example, are used in societies around the world to address social issues and taboos or warn of a threat to the community.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the urge to “go back to normal” has deprived us of the cultural representations and discourse necessary to process our collective grief. It has also made us wildly unprepared to face the next pandemic.

Reminding each other of the “COVID times” can bring up a lot of discomfort and sometimes trigger surprisingly extreme reactions. I know a thing or two about this, as someone who still masks in public indoor spaces in 2025. I am a walking visual reminder of something deep and dark, buried beneath the surface of our collective amnesia.

But the lacking or missing representations of the pandemic in the arts, popular culture and media are fragmenting our shared reality. The cultural vacuum surrounding this experience of collective grief creates a context ideal for monsters to thrive in oblivion.

In a post-truth era where fake news, conspiracy, revisionism and AI-generated content are flooding the stream of our human consciousness, it is essential that artists take on the responsibility to conjure up collective memory, however traumatic, if only for the sake of catharsis and posterity.