In Britain, at least, our much-vaunted national resilience has led to a collective repression of the Covid pandemic. We stiff-upper-lipped ourselves into Eating Out to Help Out and then the Pandemic Was Over and now this horrendous global ravaging mostly exists as a strange cultural moment, memorialised solely as that season of Taskmaster where everyone was sitting really far apart.

We don’t ever talk about Covid. We simply mention it as a thing that happened, but, you know, ‘we’re ok’. Instead,...