Pandemic plus

While most of the developed world has been dealing with the impact of the pandemic in a reasonable fashion – caring for the sick, burying the dead, enforcing lockdowns and the sort of distancing and masking that seems so necessary – it’s played out differently here in the good old US of A. Here, we have a pandemic-plus – plus a broken social safety net, a for-profit healthcare system, a war of disinformation, and that’s just to start down a list of add-on disasters.

In addition, parts of the United States have been beset by record wildfires, hurricanes, and deadly storms. So add on the impact of catastrophic climate change.

Here in the land of the fearful and the home of the riven, it’s been a pandemic plus poverty, plus staggering economic inequality, plus police violence, plus protest, plus white supremacy. It’s a nightmare, in other words and, despite those more than 210,000 dead Americans, it’s not slowing down. And no matter the facts on the ground, and the bodies below the ground, the president’s supporters regularly deny there’s the slightest need for masks, social distancing, shutdowns, or much of anything else. So, it’s a pandemic plus lunacy, too – a politically manipulated lunacy spiced with violence and the threat of violence heading into an increasingly fraught election, which could even mean a pandemic plus autocracy or a chaotic American version of fascism. In other words, it’s a lot.

Still, it’s also the fall and, after this endless summer, my three kids have started school again – sort of. They are in first, third, and eighth grade. Right now, there’s more coaching around masks and distancing than instruction in math and the ABCs. Still, the teachers are working hard to make this happen and my kids are so happy to be away from us that they don’t even seem to mind those masks, or the shields around their desks, or the regimented way lunch and recess have to happen. Over the whole experiment, of course, hangs an unnerving reality (or do I mean unreality?): that in-person schooling could dissolve in an errant cough, a spiking fever, and a few microscopic germs catapulting through the air. In fact, that’s already been happening in other areas of Connecticut where I live.

After all these months of lockdown, my husband and I automatically wear masks everywhere, arranging the odd outdoor gathering of a handful of friends and trying to imagine how any of this will work in winter, no less long term. Still, bit by bit, we’re doing our best to quilt together an understanding of how to live in the midst of such a pandemic – and that’s important because it’s so obvious that there’s going to be no quick fix in the chaotic new world we’ve been plunged into.

Seven months in, I’m finally realizing what so many marginalized people have always known: we’re on our own.

Excerpted from: ‘Why We’re on a Long Road to COVID-19 Immunity Even With Vaccines’

Counterpunch.org