THE FIRST TWO MONTHS OF 2020 now feel less like memory than alternate history. In January, reports of a “novel coronavirus” spreading through Wuhan, China registered to most Americans—if they did at all—as background noise, a problem elsewhere. (Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross cheerfully predicted that the outbreak would “help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”) The potentially deadly, highly contagious pathogen could not yet compete with the sideshow of the American imperial war machine or the crowded Democratic presidential primary, then slouching toward its opening folksy gambit.