Some Lessons I Hope We Are Learning

I was discussing this issue with some friends this week. Some lessons I hope we are learning through this COVID-19 pandemic:

1. The working class carry this economy - not the wealthy nor the executives. Look who is making and delivering our food and caring for our sick. It's the working class. You'll be hard pressed to find an executive on the front line in a mask and gloves triaging the sick or delivering food. Our heroes are those men and women who are risking their own well being to care for all of us.

2. We are globally connected - whether we like it or not. Many of our medications and general consumer goods come from China. We are seeing massive disruption in our economic supply chain as other countries deal with this pandemic in their own way. While there will be certainly those who want that to change - it will take time (it took years to get here). So let's stop the rhetoric about "them" vs. "us" - there is only a global "we" - and we are all in this together.

3. Healthcare should be a basic human right - period. Over 2 million Americans have lost their healthcare coverage and now nearly 20 million are unemployed. No other first-world country has allowed that to happen. How does one manage an illness during a pandemic without some basic right to healthcare. How an we expect a food service worker to show up during this crisis, but there’s no help should one of us transfer this virus to them (and then on to their family). We must fix this.

4. Our government has failed us - by unravelling the social support infrastructure over the past 3 years. We actually need public health departments and pandemic response teams. We need public hospitals with enough capacity to deal with emergencies. We need our scientists - even if the truth they tell us is unpopular or something we don't want to hear. Our leaders did not respond to the early warnings - believing the pandemic wasn't a worry or fake-news. As late as February we were being told not to worry, this would just go away. That misinformation set us on a course to be the most profoundly devastated country - and that should not have been the case. We SHOULD have been the most prepared. We were not. Unfortunately, we have the most number of citizens infected and the most deaths - surpassing the deaths of the Vietnam War.

5. Finally, we have exposed ourselves as a nation - to any enemy looking to do us harm. We have shown the world how deeply vulnerable we are to biological warfare. We clearly have no social-safety net; no real healthcare infrastructure for widespread testing; and virus containment strategy. We have demonstrated our inability to marshal resources at a federal level to support communities and states. Our federal government was even bidding against states for personal protective equipment (PPE) because we had none. We may be mighty when it comes to weapons of mass destruction an bombers; we are weak when the enemy is an invisible virus that disrupts our norms.

All this can be addressed - and must be addressed. The only long-term failure is blaming others and failing to act. We are a Nation with brilliant scientists and researchers. We have the resources, skill and knowledge. We need leaders who care more about the common good than their individual stock portfolio. And we need those leaders to take action in crisis.