Today's Covid-19 Thoughts

Powerless

Do you brave the plague because your job demands it, risking infection and death with every interaction, because income is essential to survival?

Do you avoid the plague, no choice of your own, because your income has been taken from you as nonessential, not sure now what is the greatest threat?

Or do you shelter from the plague, able to work from home, knowing you are one of the lucky ones, feeling powerless to help the others, feeling guilty, then feeling shame about your guilt, knowing it does even less to help?

Ten days ago I risked an extensive shopping trip for food and a few other things. Costco, Aldi, HyVee, and Westlake Ace Hardware. At the first stop, Costco, obvious safety measures were in place from the moment I approached the building. We were directed to a particular entrance with new cordoned waiting lines, allowed only to enter in our turn, and given carts that had already been disinfected. Everyone in the store remained distanced without needing reminders. Lines were taped near the registers to indicate distancing points, with employees directing the traffic. At the other stops, everything was basically normal. There were a few signs posted here and there. A few shoppers and employees were wearing masks and gloves, but significantly fewer than Costco. It was much harder to remain distanced, as many weren't making the effort.

The class divide was readily apparent. The Costco shoppers were the ones who had the luxury of sheltering at home. They expected their store to help them and it responded. The others were clearly in a different place with circumstances.

One of the odd things I noticed about myself in reflection was the way I interacted with the other shoppers. Didn't interact with them, to be accurate. Since I was trying to avoid contact and space, I found my body language unconsciously echoing the effort. I kept my gaze averted, not only avoiding eye contact, also not looking at them at all. Some part of me was trying to act invisible to indicate I wasn't a threat. Far more helpful, I'm sure, would have been smiles and reassuring, empathetic looks, but instinct led me elsewhere.

Something surprising occurred to Finn.

"Are you all scared?" he asked. "Just because you don't know where the spinning room took us? Does it scare you that much when you don't know stuff?" He jumped up to the next higher step. "You should all remember what it's like to be a second grader. There's lots of stuff I don't know or understand, and I'm fine."

~ The Strangers (Greystone Secrets #1), by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Last post I included a short thought I'd had about "just in time" services. Recently this popped up in my feed.

How Panic-Buying Revealed the Problem With the Modern World

The pandemic has shown how just-in-time systems are also fragile. . . .

What happened at supermarkets is worth dwelling on, because it reveals a problem with one of the modern world’s most hallowed concepts: efficiency. As businesses and governments chase ever-tighter margins—ever-greater efficiency—they have created systems that are finely tuned, but also delicate. Many of us are individually guilty of indulging this tendency, encouraged by the trendsetters of Silicon Valley. “The tech sector’s overarching philosophy remains bent towards treating the human brain and body like a machine that can be tweaked and perfected until it is running at peak efficiency,” the journalist Lux Alptraum wrote for Quartz in 2017. This is, however, a fundamentally inhuman philosophy. People aren’t machines. We are inherently inefficient, with our elderly parents and sick children, our mental-health problems, our chronic diseases, and our need to sleep and eat. And, as the past few months have demonstrated, our susceptibility to novel viruses.

We have been trained to see efficiency as a desirable goal. We often don’t see, or don’t acknowledge, the risk of catastrophic meltdown. Think of efficiency as a high-performance engine. Under perfect conditions, it delivers maximum power and minimum waste. However, that very efficiency makes it less robust. Highly efficient systems have no slack, no redundancy, and therefore no resilience and no spare capacity. That’s a problem because perfect conditions rarely exist for long in the real world, and “rare” events happen more often than you’d think.

Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States

Data on race and the coronavirus is too limited to draw sweeping conclusions, experts say, but disparate rates of sickness — and death — have emerged in some places.

The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates, according to data released by several states and big cities, highlighting what public health researchers say are entrenched inequalities in resources, health and access to care.

The statistics are preliminary and much remains unknown because most cities and states are not reporting race as they provide numbers of confirmed cases and fatalities. Initial indications from a number of places, though, are alarming enough that policymakers say they must act immediately to stem potential devastation in black communities.

The worrying trend is playing out across the country, among people born in different decades and working far different jobs. . . .

African-Americans account for more than half of those who have tested positive and 72 percent of virus-related fatalities in Chicago, even though they make up a little less than a third of the population. . . .

In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is. . . .

For many public health experts, the reasons behind the disparities are not difficult to explain, the result of longstanding structural inequalities. At a time when the authorities have advocated staying home as the best way to avoid the virus, black Americans disproportionately belong to part of the work force that does not have the luxury of working from home, experts said. That places them at high risk for contracting the highly infectious disease in transit or at work. . . .

Longstanding inequalities also make African-Americans less likely to be insured, and more likely to have existing health conditions and face racial bias that prevents them from getting proper treatment.

Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate

No, the coronavirus is not an “equalizer.” Black people are being infected and dying at higher rates. Here’s what Milwaukee is doing about it — and why governments need to start releasing data on the race of COVID-19 patients. . . .

The reasons for this are the same reasons that African Americans have disproportionately high rates of maternal death, low levels of access to medical care and higher rates of asthma, said Dr. Camara Jones, a family physician, epidemiologist and visiting fellow at Harvard University.

“COVID is just unmasking the deep disinvestment in our communities, the historical injustices and the impact of residential segregation,” said Jones, who spent 13 years at the CDC, focused on identifying, measuring and addressing racial bias within the medical system. “This is the time to name racism as the cause of all of those things. The overrepresentation of people of color in poverty and white people in wealth is not just a happenstance. … It’s because we’re not valued.” . . .

Because of discrimination and generational income inequality, black households in the county earned only 50% as much as white ones in 2018, according to census statistics. Black people are far less likely to own homes than white people in Milwaukee and far more likely to rent, putting black renters at the mercy of landlords who can kick them out if they can’t pay during an economic crisis, at the same time as people are being told to stay home. And when it comes to health insurance, black people are more likely to be uninsured than their white counterparts.

African Americans have gravitated to jobs in sectors viewed as reliable paths to the middle class — health care, transportation, government, food supply — which are now deemed “essential,” rendering them unable to stay home. In places like New York City, the virus’ epicenter, black people are among the only ones still riding the subway.

“And let’s be clear, this is not because people want to live in those conditions,” said Gordon Francis Goodwin, who works for Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a national racial equity organization that worked with Milwaukee on its health and equity framework. “This is a matter of taking a look at how our history kept people from actually being fully included.” . . .

“What black folks are accustomed to in Milwaukee and anywhere in the country, really, is pain not being acknowledged and constant inequities that happen in health care delivery,” Kowalik said. . . .

“When COVID-19 passes and we see the losses … it will be deeply tied to the story of post-World War II policies that left communities marginalized,” Sprague said. “Its impact is going to be tied to our history and legacy of racial inequities. It’s going to be tied to the fact that we live in two very different worlds.”

It's not enough to feel powerless; must come up with more . . .