— from Tom Eversole —
Corona Virus is a wakeup call to issues influencing our health, economy, society, and government. Stopping COVID-19 spread depends on social distancing, but many don’t have that option. People make choices within the choices they have, so addressing economic and social injustice is sound disease prevention.
Pandemic-inspired lists of essential workers include emergency/fire, healthcare, grocers, stock clerks, plumbers, cooks, waiters, electricians, and farmers. Yet, prior to the March 27 CARES Act, which of those had pre-standing, paid sick leave, health insurance, and a single-family home where they could isolate? Were unemployment benefits available for everyone including small business folks? Will America become great again under a patchwork temporary rescue legislation versus solid, enduring programs that ensure economic and public health security?
Think downstream. Our food supply chain is currently intact. Lacking healthy migrant farmworkers, will this summer’s harvest supply our fall and winter needs during a second wave of COVID?
The difference between countries that have successfully reduced COVID transmission and deaths versus less successful countries may be people’s belief in the competence of their governments. Such confidence supports social distancing directives and cooperation. Each state’s stay-at-home orders everywhere will be prolonged by the amount of time it takes the last ones to adopt theirs.
Norovirus, SARS, MERS, Zika and Ebola were all bellwethers begging a more systemic governmental response. Missing those cues, COVID is here. Now is our chance. Hopefully upcoming elections will yield leaders who own their responsibility to assure Pubic Health capacity as a national security issue.
Well said! This pandemic has made us reflect on what is most important in our lives and people who are currently putting themselves at risk to provide for our basic needs. It also highlights the economic disparities of our society in terms of who is most heavily impacted without basic health care. There are
some silver linings: slowing down and considering our priorities, reducing over-consumption, families spending more time together, cleaner air and water, incentives to grow our own (food that is). How much of this will carry forward? Back to “normal” or will we progress to a new normal.
Game B. What can we find the guts to DO, having learned something? I fear it might be a tempting evolutionary trait to forget bad things. Forget a recession, forget a political lie, forget a pandemic, forget a war, forget a holocaust, forget genocide, forget you will die. Let’s remember!
P.S. I like your lexicon of civil and human rights above. I would have preferred not use the postmodernist phrase “social justice” in the title. Thank you.
Another example of how addressing social and economic injustice is sound disease prevention: figuring out how to eliminating “food deserts” In poor communities, where lack even of markets to obtain fresh produce may result in reduced immunity to pandemics. (Today’s Boston Globe shows the disproportionate coronavirus death figures in well-populated minority communities.) One possibility would be to adapt into our communities the “Victory Gardens” of World War II; both Boston and Orcas already have versions of community gardens. The economic supply chain has not equiped the poor to expect anything except more poverty. Modifying the food supply chain could change the expectations. It may be too late for the coronavirus pandemic, but it might help all of us to avoid the next one.