The past year was devastating. Weddings, holidays and celebrations were put on hold as social life was suspended. Anxiety, distress and loneliness soared, careers stalled, and jobs disappeared. Over 500,000 people in the United States lost their lives.

At the start, it felt that we were all in it together. As affluent international travelers, celebrities and heads of government contracted the virus, many believed Covid-19 would be a great equalizer. But as the weeks and months wore on, that was revealed to be an illusion. In America, your experience of lockdown — and of the pandemic as a whole — depended not on luck or chance or fortune. It was instead largely foretold by something far more prosaic: the position you held on the socioeconomic spectrum, by your class, race and gender. Across so many issues, the pandemic is not a story of an infection curve rising and falling, but two lines moving in different directions.

We all spent less time outside, but higher-income families were able to work from home more and avoid dangerous in-person interactions.

Rich Americans could also afford to reduce in-person shopping and dining, relying heavily on essential workers and delivery services.

This was one reason lower-income workers, many of whom are people of color, were much more likely to get infected. Once sick, people of color were about two to three times as likely to die of Covid as white Americans — in part because of limited access to health care and higher rates of chronic disease.

As people refrained from outdoor leisure activities, many low-paid jobs in the service sector were permanently lost. Employment among high-paid professionals, by contrast, returned to nearly prepandemic levels in just a few months.

Latino and Black communities were hit hardest. Even as the economy slowly recovers, unemployment rates among these groups remain disproportionately high.

Women were disproportionately affected by the early wave of layoffs, causing what has been called a shecession. Though some of the jobs have returned, many women have had to juggle work with heavier household burdens, including supervising their children’s online education.

Not only did white-collar Americans keep their jobs at higher rates, but they were also able to cut back on expenses — leaving them with more money to save.

Sometimes families didn’t have enough to eat: Mile-long food lines formed across the country. According to a recent estimate, one in seven Americans may have experienced food insecurity in 2020.

At the same time, average house prices rose, as well as average rents in smaller cities, widening the gap between those who own their homes and those who don’t.

And online schooling exacerbated inequalities in educational success, as access to a computer with a decent internet connection became essential. According to a recent survey, only 70 percent of households earning less than $50,000 always have an available computer.

Perhaps most important, Americans’ life expectancy fell. The pandemic shaved off almost a year for white Americans and nearly three years for Black Americans, whose life expectancy is now at its lowest in 20 years.

The pandemic worsened disparities across society — in unemployment, education, housing, health and even survival. The discrepancies in vaccination rates, which are twice as high for white Americans as for their Black counterparts and 2.6 times as high as for Latinos, show such inequities are going nowhere. Whatever it felt like last March, Americans are clearly not in this together. Until the country’s deep inequalities are eliminated, we will not be.