COVID-19 Is More Than A Virus
Nine weeks. That is how long it took COVID-19 to become deadlier to Americans than every other war fought by this country, save for the two World Wars and the Civil War. It may be on track to take third place away from World War I. It has fundamentally changed the world, and exposed some deep and ugly fissures in our society. Millions of people in the wealthiest nation on Earth who have jobs and work as much as they can are but a single missed paycheck away from disaster. When called upon to help, those in charge of allocating our own tax dollars in ways that might help get us through, provide tens of billions of dollars to the wealthiest among us, and tell the rest to stretch $1200 over ten weeks.
We all know our situation is bad. That fact does not need to be highlighted further. Instead, this article will focus on how COVID-19 can be used to push the reset button on all the gross inequality it has pushed into the public eye.
First and foremost, the most obvious discrepancy. Our healthcare system.
Nothing in recent memory has so highlighted the need for a universal healthcare system in the Untied States. After countless individual anecdotes, after GoFundMe became the most common source of paying medical bills, after decades of reform attempts stymied by lobbyists in Washington, we finally are facing down a crisis that can’t be shoved under the rug. Our system is so broken, so underfunded and disjointed, that we had no pandemic preparations in place. We are woefully short of the protective equipment our medical professionals need. Even the tests to confirm if someone has contracted the coronavirus at all are so scarce that barely 1% of the population has received it. If we had a federally funded system, not to mention a President who didn’t scrap all of our pandemic protocols soon after assuming office, these problems would not exist. Instead of using our tax dollars to ensure that the country is in a position to protect its people, we are asked to continue throwing money into the black hole of private insurance, while hospitals continue to scrape and claw for funding. Now is the time to change that system.
Second, the minimum wage.
Businesses across the country have complained that the unemployment benefits being offered to help cope with the tens of millions of jobs lost in the last two months are so gracious that their employees have no incentive to come back to work. The truth, of course, is that they were paying so little that even a few hundred dollars a week is a better deal than they were getting working 40 hours for their employers. Maybe something as simple as a $15 an hour minimum wage isn’t enough. Maybe it needs to be tied to the average rent per region, so that no one can ever be paid less than it takes to live for a full-time job. Losing your job to a pandemic should never be a cause to have more money coming in than you had before. A system that relies upon people who can’t make enough money to survive is not a system that deserves to continue when this is over.
Finally, the office life.
More than anything else, this has highlighted how many of those meetings really could have been emails. How many wasted hours were spent on commutes, stuck in cars or trains, wasting time that not only was then not spent productively, but couldn’t be spent relaxingly or creatively either? Obviously, now the situation is not ideal because the world outside has shut down, but when that subsides, why go back to the way things were? Why continue with the five-day work week, the forty-hour work week, or the 9-5 work day? Countless jobs can be performed from anywhere, at any time. And being able to do so dramatically improves the quality of life for those who can. More time spent with family, with pets, with loved ones, less spent stuck in traffic. When the stressful backdrop to our situation ends, why not continue to enjoy the parts of it that made things better?
This will pass, eventually. Those pushing for a return to “normalcy” are either missing a golden opportunity or attempting to make things move too fast for others to see it. This is a chance to emerge better than we were before. We shouldn’t miss it.
