Nicole Hemmer is an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and the author of "Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics." She hosts the history podcast "Past Present" and created the podcast "A12." The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN) On Wednesday, several thousand mostly-conservative activists surrounded the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, to protest the governor's coronavirus lockdown orders.

Nicole Hemmer

That same day, CNN reported that, in just one month's time, 30,000 people in the U.S. had died from the virus.

Those two stories — one of people demanding a return to normal, the other of a harrowing body count that shows how far away normal remains — are a national snapshot of the struggle many Americans are having on a very personal level: a deep craving for a return to our old lives and a rational fear that old habits are now life-threatening risks.

It's the cognitive dissonance of Covid-19, created not just by a set of personal desires but by a set of conflicting messages from public health officials and politicians across the country. And while some of the conflict does reflect willful misinformation and political maneuvering — including, most dangerously, from the White House — much of it comes from something Americans as a whole have not faced in generations: ongoing, life-threatening uncertainty.

Not everything is unknown, of course. Pandemics are not new and epidemiologists have provided us with countless models, regularly updated, to suggest where we might end up. Even as they change, the models serve as lifelines: something we can grasp onto, that give us some sense of security and groundedness, even while we're still at sea. But they're easy to turn into talismans as well. If I can just find the right model, if I can seize on scientific certainty, then I'll be safe. It's why so many of us compulsively look at numbers, hoping to grasp the crisis with a specificity that makes it knowable, and therefore controllable.