It would be applicable to call the fight against coronavirus a war, and the brave soldiers are the medical workings who continue to treat dangerously contagious patients and search for a cure as well as the millions of people following stay at home orders to prevent the spread of the virus.
As we struggle with the daily changes and uncertainty at the hands of COVID-19, we're given a taste of the challenges of WWII and what that generation lived through. VE Day felt like an enormous exhale.
“The unconditional surrender of our enemies was the signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind,” wrote British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
A similar feeling of joy will undoubtedly come when we see the day that COVID-19 is finally eradicated, but the uncertainty until that point is also comparable to the rise of Stalin's Red Army following the fall of the Nazis. While one wave of COVID might seem to be at a halt, it's only a matter of time until a second wave hits the population.
On May 2, historian Rick Atkinson wrote in The Wall Street Journal that he sees the postwar order "sputtering" as the "current pandemic has exposed grave shortcomings in American leadership” alongside deep fissures with allies and a “decline in American willingness to lead with aspirational, albeit imperfect, moral authority.”
With the rise of WWII references while discussing the COVID-19 crisis, America's hope is that we can pull through this now the same way we pulled through a crisis 75 years ago.