Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

A physician and Yale University professor focused on epidemiology, Nicholas Christakis offers a frontline story including his own experiences at hospital beds in New York as well as eyewitness testimony. Discussing historical models including the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages, the Spanish Flu in the early twentieth century, and the SARS pandemic of 1957 and 1968, he argues that “What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us” (Christakis 84). Taking inspiration from the duality of the mythological Greek god Apollo in his ability to heal and spread illness, Christakis outlines both the negative and positive consequences of the pandemic. The pandemic was characterized by mass death as much as it was by altruism and compassion. Written during the first wave, Apollo’s Arrow is limited in not considering later events such as the rapidity of combatting the pandemic through vaccination that later accounts would supply. Although American society was fractured in many ways by the pandemic, Christakis uses the United States as an example of how collective efforts confronted and countered socio-political divides. Even though the pandemic was “a collective catastrophe that must be experienced separately” (Christakis 211), it was the collective spirit of individual efforts that was instrumental in mitigating the damage. Apollo’s Arrow highlights the importance of collaborative social intervention as much as scientific and technological advances in combatting disease.