Everyone is really tired of this COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone is really tired of sheltering in place. So, lots and lots of people want to come out and go back to work and back to the way it was. But....
It is true that the collapse of the economy is forcing us to open businesses back up. It is true that the economic toll is so dire that we can't just shelter in place forever. But we have to do it with what we have learned so far - social distancing and masks are absolutely needed, please.
And we desperately need tests, tests, tests, tests...
Because we don't have a national strategy from the Trump administration we don't have the two mandatory things we need to actually go back into the world - millions and millions of tests to give to people as a condition of being in public, and an effective drug or other remedy to help people come back from the disease easier and quicker. These are massive failings on the part of our national government. It is literally unimaginable to me that we don't have a national strategy and funding to work our way through this plague.
I wrote on April 1 that there are two huge structural problems in our economy - first, an ever increasing inequality of income between the rich and the poor. The Middle Class has been hollowed out for four decades. Huge percentages of people cannot go two paychecks without going hungry or lose their homes. When the poor are forced into an unbearable suffering, revolutions happen.
Second, our economy is destroying the environment - e.g. ocean warming is wiping out the coral reefs which generate a food chain that goes all the way up to us.
So, during the Democratic Primaries I wanted a moderate like Biden because I was certain that Sanders or Yang would be too socialist and lose to a man who is pathologically cruel, arrogantly ignorant, and grandiosely unable to deal with reality. His latest delusion is that the virus will go away by itself without vaccines. Hard to believe that anyone voted for him.
But, how does Yang's UBI, Universal Basic Income, look now? He was talking about jobs and careers disappearing to computers and automation, but what will our economy look like in two years? How many industries just won't come back?
And, how does Medicare for All sound now? How many millions have lost not only their job but have lost their health coverage? Can we live in a country where so many millions are left to the cruelties of this terrible pandemic? or the next health catastrophe?
It's not over. The next big wave of COVID-19 cases will be the rural areas of Trump's red states. And the second wave in the cities is also likely to come.
It's not over. It's just starting.
