As Elias Bruno, a 31-year-old construction worker in Panama City, Fla., who supports five relatives in Mexico, explained it to a Times reporter: “We are struggling here, but it’s worse in Mexico. You have to make every sacrifice to feed your family.” It is fitting that a World Economic Forum report called remittance senders the “frontline workers of economic security.”How should we make sense of these pandemic money puzzles? Why did pandemic money break the precedent established by the Great Recession dip in donations and remittances?Jonathan Meer, an economics professor at Texas A&M University who focuses on charitable giving, told me that this time was different because “between government transfers and reductions in discretionary spending, many households found themselves in a much better financial situation during the pandemic.” As a result, many people were more able to donate. And certainly, virtual payment systems such as PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay and Cash App and sites like GoFundMe, which were not available or not as widely adopted in 2008, allow for cheaper, faster and more personalized money transfers.But neither technology nor economics can fully explain why, amid financial uncertainty and physical peril, people would part with their money. Why give money away, even without an urgent immediate need for funds? Why not just save it?Because in our bizarre pandemic world, money served as an unexpected social bridge. After all, despite the profound class, race and gender disparities of the pandemic, everyone became physically vulnerable. This created a collective trauma that did not exist in the 2008 financial crisis and may have resulted in greater solidarity. Heads of government, movie stars and other prominent figures got Covid-19, as did people’s friends, family and colleagues.In the case of remittances’ resilience, those international monetary transfers persisted not only as financial lifeboats for families abroad but also as powerful monetary representations of nonnegotiable kin and ethnic solidarities.Money worked so well as a social connector because it is malleable. Pandemic money could serve as ordinary charity, a kind of politicized mutual aid, a personal gift or just a large tip, depending on the social connections between giver and recipient.