Twenty years after terrorists infiltrated the world’s sole superpower, turned passenger aircraft into guided missiles and reduced the Twin Towers and part of the Pentagon to rubble, has the truism of that moment—that 9/11 “changed everything”—proven to be false?

For all the solemn odes to the day’s significance that will be heard on its looming 20th anniversary, the truth remains: September 11 did not, as it turned out, inaugurate a new age of massive terrorist attacks in the United States. Even the initially unimaginable scale of the attacks themselves has slowly come to look less shocking. The 2,977 souls lost now rank alongside the successive tolls of Hurricane Katrina and the coronavirus pandemic. The latter has claimed well over half a million American lives already. According to official statistics, on 38 individual days of the pandemic more Americans died from Covid-19 than perished on 9/11.