Six on Coronavirus: Where did the novel coronavirus come from?; COVID-19 Hits NYC’s Black and Brown Working Class the Hardest; Lessons are learned from every pandemic. And every time, we forget them; FAIR: A Pandemic Is Not a War; Things Won’t Just G
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Thanks John and Gary
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Assatou Kone is one of the many essential workers for whom life has not paused.
“It is stressful,” she says. “I was one of the people who supported shutting down the MTA to get this virus under control. Councilmember Mark Levine posted a hashtag that said shut down the MTA and I definitely supported it.“
On her commute, Kone must not only navigate the city but a deadly virus as well. Normally mundane choices such as where to stand are now perilous.
Without a complete shutdown, Kone, a political science major at City College who lives alone, has continued to work to pay her rent and tuition. Recently, with CUNY moving to distanced learning, she has had to install internet in her home. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to enroll in Optimum’s free student package and with assignments due, she added broadband to her monthly expenses.
Living off the 6 Line near St. Lawrence Avenue, she commutes 50 minutes for her shifts as a manager at a large fast-food chain on the Upper West Side. The subway has a different atmosphere these days. Some subway cars have become de facto dormitories for the homeless, while workers fill other cars, unable to adhere to the mandated 6-feet social distance.
“There are people who will stand right next to you,” says Kone, who transfers from the 6 to the crosstown bus at 72nd Street, not only navigating the city but the deadly virus as well. Normally mundane choices such as where to sit or stand are now perilous. “You need to make a decision between the homeless laying in the other car or sitting next to somebody.”
Throughout her commute, Kone sees construction workers, healthcare staff and nonuniform essential workers, but something else sticks out to her about these straphangers. They are near uniformly black and brown.
“I may be only see one white person a week,” she says.
While Kone has been fortunate to stay healthy, commuting with the mask and gloves her employer provides, many Bronxites have not been so lucky, dying at double the rate of any other borough.
The city has begun releasing statistics on race and COVID-19 infections after calls from advocates to do so. They show that black and Latino New Yorkers are disproportionately testing positive for the disease and are dying at double the rate of other racial groups. In response to the racial disparities, the scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor recently changed the adage “When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia” to “When white America catches novel coronavirus, black Americans die.”
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In attempting to explain these disparities, Surgeon General Jerome Adams urged African Americans to “stop drinking, smoking or doing drugs to protect those who are most vulnerable.”
The hardest stricken areas of New York tell a different story: pre-vulnerabilities to the virus are directly connected to a history of environmental racism and economic inequality.
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"Some time in the future, when all of this is finally over, there will be a postmortem effort on a scale this country has probably never before seen.
Provinces will assemble their own regional inquiries. There will be a massive, multi-pronged federal royal commission. Newly created bodies will undertake their own investigations, as will professional organizations representing essential emergency personnel. And each final report will culminate with a list of critical recommendations to implement in time for when the next novel virus makes its way to Canada.
It will take years of inquiry to fill in the details, but we know now – even in the midst of the current COVID-19 pandemic – what many of those reports will advise: A serious bolstering of public health budgets, perhaps with federal health transfers earmarked specifically for public health; careful tracking and maintenance of infectious-disease laboratories in order to keep up with surge demand during a pandemic; better integration and preservation of the National Emergency Stockpile System; an overhaul of long-term care homes to include space to quarantine infected residents, personal protective equipment for staff and systemic funding and regulatory changes such that personal support workers don’t need to work in multiple homes to earn a proper living. This is a non-exhaustive list.
The above recommendations should all sound familiar – they are, in fact, recycled from postmortem reports on Canada’s response to SARS nearly two decades ago. Indeed, the SARS Commission specifically warned of the dangers of unco-ordinated, underresourced public health agencies. The National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health emphasized the need for robust and dynamic emergency stockpiles. The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario documented the “extreme overreliance” on part-time and casual staff, which chronically plagues long-term care. We knew of all of these issues long before COVID-19 was first reported in China. But in the years since SARS, we’ve lost the impetus for actually putting these measures into practice.
The SARS Commission was prescient in anticipating the deleterious effect time could have on its recommendations. “As the memory of SARS fades,” it warned, “as budget pressures loom and when there is so much talk about change, it is important that governments, local, provincial and federal, are held to the talk: that talk becomes action and that necessary resource levels are maintained and are not permitted to decline.”
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"Us Against Them
War always has an enemy. Identifying the virus, Levenson calls it “an enemy who can strike at any time,” using the personalized who instead of the impersonal that. In war discourse, the enemy is a personalized target, not a virus. Enemies are always at fault. The communist, the illegal alien or the terrorist can never be negotiated with, for they are demonized and outside the bounds of our own humanity.
Like all the enemies identified in Trump’s lexicon of hate and xenophobia, Covid-19 is exoticized as the “China Virus.” The enemies of war are dehumanized, positioned on the other side of a wall between us and them. They are part of a vision of a world divided in conflict, at a time when the best way to deal with this pandemic is collectively, at the local and global levels. But instead of joining international efforts to contain the pandemic, the US is still targeting enemies, sanctioning Iran and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis there, engaging in regime change in Venezuela, cheered on by media, and bombing Iraq. While the World Health Organization has organized an international consortium called Solidarity, to advance as quickly as possible, global research needed to develop treatments, anti-viral drugs and a vaccine, Trump has vowed to cut off US funding for WHO."
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Eventually I realize that fear elicits two distinct responses in me, and perhaps in all of us. Sometimes it causes me to withdraw into myself, toward solitude and silence. But other times it teaches me to be humble and to practice solidarity."
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