What the pandemic surge at the start of COVID Year Three tells us we should be looking at; and why we aren’t.
Nine million.
9,000,000.
That’s the number of people out sick with COVID in the United States.
At the same time. Another three million are out caring for someone who has COVID.
Nearly two years into the pandemic and we have yet to answer the most elementary question of the pandemic:
What if people can’t come in to work?
There’s a pretty obvious reason why we never answered that question.
We never bothered to deal with this inevitability.
There’s no answer today because we never tried to come up with one. We avoided this. We were more focused on the abstract ideological questions:
- Is the state allowed to restrict certain behaviors or demand certain other behaviors?
- How can we avoid economic stagnation and keep the system afloat?
- And how can we prevent the hospitals from becoming overwhelmed?
While most of the questions that dominated our personal lives in 2020 and 2021 were built on actual lived experience (Should I wear a mask? and What is the effectiveness of the vaccines?), our communities, states, and nations were fixated on abstract arguments about rights, economics, and the law.
Within the noise of all this arguing, the most salient argument was about how to manage our lives within a pandemic. And we took to that argument with gusto.
We talked about “lockdowns” and “opening up” and in-person schooling and mental health and employment and poverty and all the big things surrounding the pandemic.
Spread, infection, and death were tracked. Or avoided, depending on ideology.
And we worried about unemployment and inflation. But only in the most abstract of terms.
All the while, the most obvious problem was staring at us.
What if everybody gets sick at the same time?
None of our conversations or solutions have accounted for true mass infection. Volumes of infection that aren’t just about overwhelming hospitals or closing a single plant down and disrupting the supply chain.
Neither political party has given any mental real estate to the problem of twelve million people not being able to show up for work.
Schools last week sent entire classes home during the middle of school. Not just because of potential spread, but because kids are getting sick.
The level of disruption is real and we are refusing to deal with it.
The “let ‘er rip” mentality, which wants to just “do normal” and tough it out has shown less than no effort to account for this disruption. In fact, it preferences making people work when they are sick. Which is pretty much wrong in every possible way (public health, labor, mental health). Which means it undermines the very reasons previously argued for being “open”.
At the same time, the legislative decision to let local communities “do what’s best for them” provides neither the infrastructure support for a mass problem or the flexibility to deal with a sudden disruption.
We’re all too busy arguing about whether or not people want to work at Burger King.
The problem we’ve been avoiding is here.
As we enter COVID Year Three, we’re once again seeing a major landscape change.
Arguing about quarantines and timetables, masks and vaccines is last year. It’s missing the point. Avoidance.
We need to be looking at what is here and now.
It’s time to focus. Nine million people are sick. They need support. Infrastructures need to be maintained. Spread needs to be minimized.
We need to make this society more valuable to the people living in it.