The pandemic has been awful. But imagine it had struck 20 years ago.

Imagine what might have happened if covid-19 had hit in 2000 instead of 2020. The virus could have traveled as quickly down those economic superhighways. But the first in a series of seminal papers by Karikó and her colleagues was still five years from being published, and work on adenovirus vaccines, such as those from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, was also in early innings. We might well have had to make do with less effective vaccines, like the dead-virus vaccine from Sinovac, or simply wait until at least 70 percent of the population had gotten sick. But ultimately, any talk of vaccines might have been an academic discussion. Then, we didn’t have the technologies that allowed so many people to socially distance while they waited for a vaccine. And even if you think we shouldn’t have “canceled everything,” you can acknowledge the evidence showing that a lot of economic activity probably would have stopped regardless. Twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have had the online shopping and entertainment options that made isolation semi-tolerable. All of which adds up to: Even a short time ago, more of us would have gotten sick, more of us would have lost loved ones, and, quite possibly, more of us would have lost businesses and jobs. The pandemic has been awful, and the toll too terrible for words. But it’s also true that we avoided much suffering — and just how much should stun us into silence every time we think about it.