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I doubt I ever feel older or more passe' than when I'm out in my city -- New York -- and I still put on a mask before stepping onto a bus, going into the subway, or entering a store. Increasingly, I find myself alone in a world of the unmasked with the exception of a few other ancient types like me. Once upon a time, I could look online at the Guardian or the New York Times and I wouldn't be able to avoid the latest devastating numbers on Covid-19. Now, I can read and read and read and never notice a thing.
In fact, the Times did have daily figures until March 23rd when, noting that data on the pandemic from state and local health officials was fast disappearing, it added: "After more than three years of daily reporting of coronavirus data in the United States, the New York Times is ending its Covid-19 data-gathering operation. The Times will continue to publish virus data from the federal government weekly on a new set of tracking pages, but this page will no longer be updated." Still, if you do look at those weekly figures, there were 94,000 weekly cases reported in this country and -- yes -- 1,160 weekly deaths as of the moment I wrote this introduction. It's true that, at least for now, those numbers continue to decline, adding ever fewer Americans to the -- hold your breath for a moment -- 1,123,836 deaths the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported on March 10th of this year when it, too, stopped collecting data.
And yes, there is indeed a new Covid booster (which I plan to get) for older adults and the immunocompromised, but I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that ever fewer Americans are even bothering. Of course, since Donald Trump and crew made the pandemic into a deeply divisive issue, for many of us, including significant numbers who died, not boosting or masking was part of our politics, not our health. Grimmer yet, the figures do show that Republicans died of Covid at a significantly higher rate than Democrats.
So, today, I felt a certain kinship with TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign Liz Theoharis when she reminded us of the devastation the pandemic brought our way and the even more devastating urge now to cancel what was done in the midst of its horror to help the poor. One thing should be clear from her piece today: however the Covid crisis ends, our crisis will certainly continue. Tom
The Pandemic Portal View
Lessons for Moral Standard-Bearers in a Sick Society
"In order to fully recover, we must first recover the society that has made us sick."
I can still hear those prophetic words, now a quarter-century old, echoing through the Church Center of the United Nations. At the podium was David, a leader with New Jerusalem Laura, a residential drug recovery program in North Philadelphia that was free and accessible to people, no matter their insurance and income status. It was June 1998 and hundreds of poor and low-income people had gathered for the culminating event of the "New Freedom Bus Tour: Freedom from Unemployment, Hunger, and Homelessness," a month-long, cross-country organizing event led by welfare rights activists. Two years earlier, President Bill Clinton had signed welfare "reform" into law, gutting life-saving protections and delivering a punishing blow to millions of Americans who depended on them.
That line of David's has stuck with me over all these years. He was acutely aware of how one's own health -- whether from illness, addiction, or the emotional wear and tear of life -- is inextricably connected to larger issues of systemic injustice and inequality. After years on the frontlines of addiction prevention and treatment, he also understood that personal recovery can only happen en masse in a society willing to deal with the deeper malady of poverty and racism. This month, his words have been on my mind again as I've grieved over the death of Reverend Paul Chapman, a friend and mentor who was with me at that gathering in 1998. The issue of "recovery" has, in fact, been much on my mind as the Biden administration prepares to announce the official end of the public-health emergency that accompanied the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For our society, that decision is more than just a psychological turning of the page. Even though new daily cases continue to number in the thousands nationally, free testing will no longer be available for many, and other pandemic-era public-health measures -- including broader access to medication for opioid addiction -- will also soon come to an end. Worse yet, a host of temporary health and nutrition protections are now on the chopping block, too (and given the debate on the debt ceiling in Congress, the need for such programs is particularly dire).
When the pandemic first hit, the federal government temporarily banned any Medicaid or Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) cuts, mandating that states offer continuous coverage. As a result, enrollment in both swelled, as many people in need of health insurance found at least some coverage. But that ban just expired and tens of millions of adults and children are now at risk of losing access to those programs over the next year. Many of them also just lost access to critically important Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, as pandemic-era expansions of that program were cut last month.
Of course, the announced "end' of the public-health emergency doesn't mean the pandemic is really over. Thousands of people are still dying from it, while 20% of those who had it are experiencing some form of long Covid and many elderly and immunocompromised Americans continue to feel unsafe. Nor, by the way, does that announcement diminish a longer-term, slow-burning public health crisis in this country.
Early in the pandemic, Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, warned that the virus was exploiting deeply entrenched fissures in our society. Before the pandemic, there had already been all too many preconditions for a future health calamity: in 2020, for instance, there were 140 million people too poor to afford a $400 emergency, nearly 10 million people homeless or on the brink of homelessness, and 87 million underinsured or uninsured.
Last year, the Poor People's Campaign commissioned a study on the connections between Covid-19, poverty, and race. Sadly, researchers found the fact that all too many Americans refused to be vaccinated did not alone explain why this country had the highest pandemic death toll in the world. The lack of affordable and accessible health care contributed significantly to the mortality rate. The study concluded that, despite early claims that Covid-19 could be a "great equalizer," it's distinctly proven to be a "poor people's pandemic" with two to five times as many inhabitants of poor counties dying of it in 2020 and 2021 as in wealthy ones.
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