The quality that made the tightly knit Fusco family great was the very thing that exacted the harshest price.

Two dozen or so relatives had gathered five years ago for dinner, as they often did. They talked loudly, hugged and shared food, unaware of the virus that filled the air in a kitchen in New Jersey and was about to dig its deadly spikes into the fabric of life in the United States.

Within days, four of the Fuscos were dead.

At the time, only nine deaths had been attributed to Covid-19 in New Jersey, a state that has recorded more than 36,000 virus-related fatalities since the start of the pandemic.

Their names and photos flashed in headlines across the globe in March 2020 as their story became an object lesson about the potency of the virus and the importance of adhering to a then-foreign concept of social distancing.

The world has mostly moved on, though people continue to die of the virus every day. But for the surviving Fuscos, a ghostlike companion has hovered over many of the intervening 1,823 days.

“Every day, you get up, and you’re like, ‘Did this really happen?’” said Maria Reid, who spent weeks on a ventilator fighting for life. “And then you’re like, ‘Yeah. It happened.’