Covid-19: the Scythe is Coming

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So far, the pandemic’s advance here at home has been slow. There are reasons why. It started in China and had to get here somehow. The virus came in people who travel back and forth internationally. Those people come and go mostly by air, with some on cruise ships.

Nearly all of those travelers are people with means. Many—especially those on cruise ships—are retired. They have ready access to medical care: they have Medicare and/or good private health insurance. Most of those who still work have managerial or “information economy” jobs that let them work from home. Those who are retired don’t have to work at all. So the expectations are reasonable that those likely infected will self-monitor, get tested, seek medical care when needed, stay at home when sick or known to have been exposed, self-quarantine when advisable, and strictly obey quarantine rules and medical advice.

In other words, Covid-19 came to our shores through the so-called “upper classes.” What happens when it hits the “lower classes”? We’re about to find out.

American health care’s dirty little secret is that it leaves a lot of people out. Some 37 million have no health insurance. Another fifty million or so have inadequate health insurance. And some 11 million undocumented workers have no ready health care at all. If state law gives them some access to doctors in theory, Trump’s new law threatens to deport them if they seek any kind of public assistance.

These are not “information workers” who can work by computer from home. They have to show up to get paid. They are not affluent; most live paycheck to paycheck. So if they feel sick or suspect they’ve been exposed, will they stay home and get tested, as advised?

Not likely. They will ignore public-health advice and stay in the shadows. They will not be able to afford the tests, or the masks, disinfectants and other precautions, let alone find them in our already depleted stores. They will delude themselves about their health. They will drag themselves to work as long as they are physically able. They will suppress their coughs and sneezes with over-the-counter medications and sheer will power. In order to keep their pay coming, they will bring Covid-19 right into the factories, construction sites, slaughterhouses, theaters, hotels, restaurants, and the homes of rich folk where they work. They will not do so out of malice or even thoughtlessness; they will do so just to survive.

To understand how this “second wave” of infections will work, and how fast it will spread, consider the nursing home in Seattle that is, so far, the US center of Covid-19 deaths. We don’t know yet how it got there, but we do know it killed a lot of old people in the home.

Now, what about the minimum-wage workers who tend the elderly there? Are they all in quarantine? What about their families and friends, their social acquaintances, and the people in their poorer neighborhoods with whom they socialize and go to church, synagogue or mosque? Have they all been traced and quarantined, if necessary? Unlikely.

I’ve never understood what’s “conservative” about a society that claims to be class-free but consciously maintains a lower class and an underclass. The lower class includes minimum-wage workers with no health insurance, no health care and no paid sick days. The underclass includes 11 million undocumented workers that the GOP’s business wing keeps in appalling conditions for fear of deportation, while the GOP’s political wing seeks to demonize and deport them to garner votes from our lower middle class.

Whatever you call this abomination of a system, there’s one sense in which it’s not and can never be “conservative.” It’s not going to save us from the virus. Instead, it’s going to bring it right into our communities, workplaces, places of rest and recreation. For those of us affluent enough to have nannies, cooks, gardeners, housekeepers, personal assistants, or trainers, it’s going to bring the virus right into our homes.

How long will it take? Probably no more than a month or three. Once the virus hits the lower class and underclass, there will be little to restrain it from spreading. Sick and exposed people will have little or no incentive to follow rules that might leave them destitute or homeless or get them deported.

How many people will get sick? Suppose it’s fifth of our population. That’s over sixty million people. If the death rate is just the 2.4% initially suspected (and not the larger 3.4% now under consideration), that means 1.57 million of us will die. That’s about as many as all our fighters killed in all the wars in our entire history, from our Revolutionary War to Afghanistan today.

Can we stop the second wave now? Maybe, but not likely. We’d have to pass emergency laws giving our lower class and our underclass free access to necessary health care and paid sick days off. Then we’d have to get the word out to most or all of them before the virus hit them in their various locations, so they wouldn’t just hide. If you think Congress, let alone our current executive branch, is capable of doing something so effective and necessary in only a month or two, you haven’t been paying attention.

So get ready for the scythe. Its second sweep is going to cut us down. Mercifully, it will spare young children and their parents, who seem much more resistant to the virus than us geezers.

It’ll take the progressive and the “conservative” alike. There may not be much poetic justice in that equality, but taking the aged first seems fair. It was all of us who, by sins of commission and omission, let this gross class discrimination in health care survive and grow like a cancer for decades. Unlike our health-care system, the virus doesn’t care what class you’re in; being human is enough for it.

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