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Friday, January 26th, 2024

Covid, Year Four

Author:     Gregg Gonsalves
Source:     The Nation.
Publication Date:     25 January 2024
 Link: Covid, Year Four
Stephan:  

If you think Covid is over you are wrong, as this article spells out. More than that if you don’t realize and acknowledge how badly Republican state governments have dealt with this pandemic than you are either willfully ignorant or just lying to yourself.  Covid is still a major threat and the Republican governance, the anti-vaxxer movement, from RFK, Jr to The horrible DeSantis’ quack Surgeon General, have killed hundred of thousands Americans. More than that in year four we should recognize that this is but one of the pandemics we are going to face in the future and the Covid pandemic should teach us something important about the failure of the American illness profit system.

An outdoor Covid-19 mobile testing site on the streets of New York City.

Four years of Covid-19. A total of 1.165 million deaths in the United States. As of December, we were averaging about 1,500 deaths a week from Covid. These numbers may seem abstract to many, but I remember a scientific paper from early in the pandemic that estimated “for every Covid-19 death, approximately nine surviving Americans will lose a grand­parent, parent, sibling, spouse, or child”­­—which means 60,000 Americans were left grieving for the holidays.

Public health is about trade-offs between risks and benefits, just like personal health. Think about your own life: We all weigh the pleasure of that second glass of wine or extra slice of cake against the calories we know that pleasure will bring. And I’m not judging here, as I make these same decisions daily. (Give me that chocolate chip cookie.)

Yet I am not quite sure we’ve ever had an explicit discussion about the collective trade-offs we’ve made when it comes to Covid. As the […]

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