Previous events have had global impact in the past. Billions of lives have been affected by, say, the French Revolution, or 9/11. Contemporaneous writers have made cases for various events as the “shot heard round the world” or Ten Days That Shook the World. But these events were not experienced by the entire world at the same time—not even close.

In the 20th century, some events came close. World War II had a global economic and political impact, even in countries that didn’t take direct part in the fighting, but it didn’t dominate public life in much of Africa or Latin America to nearly the same extent as the pandemic. While it was going on, a significant portion of the world’s population could probably go days or at least hours without thinking about it.

The 1918 flu pandemic reached every region of the world but, in part because of wartime information restrictions, was not fully understood as a global event while it was happening. At a time when deaths from infections disease were more common, the extent of the devastation was clear only in retrospect. It left a surprisingly faint cultural impact. By contrast, can you imagine a future book or movie set anywhere in the world in the spring of 2020 that omits mention of the pandemic?