the year is 2050 and you've been asked to write about the coronavirus pandemic for a museum. what story would you tell?
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National Museum of American History, in Washington, D.C., started to get worried in February. She was deep into planning a major exhibition called “In Sickness and in Health” that was partly about the disease outbreaks that have changed the country’s trajectory, from the Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793 to the viruses brought West by white settlers in the eighteen-thirties, which killed huge numbers of indigenous people. The exhibit was slated to open next year, but Lord and her colleagues were suddenly reading reports of a virus that had surfaced in China and that was beginning to blossom around the globe: on a cruise ship in Yokohama, at ski resorts in France. As the chair of the museum’s division of medicine and science, and a specialist in the history of public health, Lord had been on pandemic watch for a long time. Was this another sars? Was it another Spanish flu? “By March, it was pretty clear,” she recalled recently. “This was going to be a huge story.”