Wired posts a really interesting report on the University of Washington’s Global Burdens of Disease project, which looks at who gets sick from what worldwide and how all that sickness—much of it preventable—affects the wealth of nations. With data available just through 2019, the GBD project identifies the preëxisting conditions—our weak social safety net and strong economic inequalities—that have made the coronavirus pandemic worse in the United States of America than in most of the rest of the world:
As the Lancet editors note in an accompanying editorial, those statistics are also how COVID-19 turned the US into a country with one of the highest rates of infection and death in the world. Those metabolic disorders preferentially affect the poor and people of color. Poor people and people of color are also, because of their often precarious economic positions in the US, less likely to be able to work at home and more likely to be “essential workers,” with more exposure to COVID-19. “They happen to be people of color. They happen to have more chronic conditions. They delay medical care, they don’t have insurance, they don’t have money, and they don’t have access,” Mokdad says. “They’re more exposed. They have more risk factors. And they’re more likely to die.” The diseases and disorders they are most likely to have are also the exact comorbidities that make COVID-19 more severe, or fatal. They are, literally and metaphorically, the nation’s preexisting conditions.
This is an especially torqued kind of screwing because it didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t happen in societies with well-built social and medical safety nets. “If you have fewer assets, lower income, less wealth, less housing, are a person of color, you are less likely to be able to work from home,” says Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. “So there was a gap, a disparity in risk of acquiring COVID. That is a reflection of greater exposure” [Adam Rogers, “The Preexisting Conditions of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Wired, 2020.10.16].
Rogers goes on to point out that underinvesting in public goods and services and praying to the free-market gods to keep our working underclass afloat traps us in a deathly spiral that makes it harder to control the pandemic and check its inequitous impacts:
“By shutting down the economy, we hurt poor people and people of color more, economically, than by keeping it open,” says Alan Krupnick, an economist and senior fellow at Resources for the Future. “But you can’t open up the economy until people have a reasonable expectation that they’re going to be safe when they go to a restaurant or bar, or go to work. The disease needs to get taken care of first so that the economy can blossom.” That’s an income effect, and it creates a feedback loop. Trying to deal with the effects of the pandemic after it has already swallowed the economy makes the economic effects worse on the most vulnerable … which means that to survive financially they have to expose themselves to more risk … which makes their comorbidities potentially more dangerous [Rogers, 2020.10.16].
Maybe that’s why Kristi Noem is letting things go to pandemic hell in South Dakota. She presides over a state that has mortgaged its tax revenues to all sorts of corporate raiders who promise jobs and wages that will obviate any need for any state tax increases or reforms. We whore ourselves out to tax dodgers and itinerant retirees for a relative pittance. And we pin our economic hopes to low-wage jobs in food manufacturing and tourism that can’t be shut down for pandemic safety without putting huge numbers of working poor South Dakotans in need of state support.
Thus, rather than shutting things down and paying workers from the state and federal coffers to stay home for a month to let coronavirus simmer down, rather than sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into building better online learning and providing more family leave to let parents stay home, stay healthy, and help teach their kids, we spend coronavirus relief dollars on tourism ads to get more people to break quarantine and pack our bars and motels and hunting lodges. We plan and promote reckless events like the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally because our leaders lack the vision, creativity, and ambition to think that there might be any other way for us to scrounge up the dough to take care of ourselves.
Apparerntly South Dakota’s so poor we can’t afford to fight coronavirus. We just have to keep marching our workers—and, disproportionately, our poorer, browner workers—to their deaths to keep our sales tax dollars flowing and protect our Governor and Legislature from getting serious about taxing, investing, and governing.
South Dakota reported 806 new coronavirus cases and eight more coronavirus deaths yesterday. 315 South Dakotans have died so far this year from this pandemic. But enjoy the pheasant hunting, and please, double your tips.
Brilliant report sir. Yes, when you are broke and busted, you will indeed “whore” yourself out to the first corrupt shinny thing that comes along. Even CAFO’s pollute the water and the land, but like in any third world country, they are a whore necessity to keep the banana republic alive. The state doesn’t have the character to work, so they think of ways to line their pockets by whoring.
Gambling, of course, restaurants and bar crowd, with workers barely surviving on slave wages and conditions. So much so, that those workers have two or three other jobs that are also crap, until the trump virus. Squashing the will of the people (think Sturgis where 60% of the locals voted against the opening of the rally) and then you get the idea of autocracy/fascism that rule the day here. We are broke both economically and legislatively, what a combo! Hospitals are full and no qualified workers to take care of our sick. No idea legislators are partying like its 1999. Take a look at District 35 to see loser city incumbent reps. Booyah!!
We made this morning’s WaPo.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/17/sturgis-rally-spread/
More and more I see this going back to sacrifice: there is no will to make individual sacrifice for the common good. If there ever were a foundational objection to capitalism, it is the individual greed that undermines the common good being held up as virtue. Few have obscene excess while many live levels of destitution. The social safety net is allowed to disintegrate because the wealthy’s excess would have to fund it.
Queen krusty and King dumbald could not be happier than a sow and boor swimming in poop, they delight in the fact that the serfs are being thinned out by the pandemic, after all they do not contribute enough in tax to be of any value to them.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/as-coronavirus-cases-rise-red-state-governors-resist-measures-to-slow-the-spread-preach-personal-responsibility/ar-BB1a8X28?ocid=msedgntp
O, is it possible that the thesis that I’m advancing here, that we’re too economically weak and undiversified to fight coronavirus, behind what you see as an unwillingness to sacrifice, too? Is it possible that our state leaders as well as the general public feel that we’re so close to the edge, just barely hanging on, that we can’t afford to make any sacrifices?
Or have we just swirled into some cultural eddy, where Daugaardian self-reliance and other Republican slogans of crowded out any sense of real community action?
South Dakotans do show up and do nice things for each other. Why aren’t we seeing sacrifice to serve the common good on coronavirus from more South Dakotans?
“our leaders lack the vision, creativity, and ambition”
Yeah, that is absolutely true to their core.
Next year a new federal tax package will hit the wealthy gougers right where they deserve it. More $ will become available for an array of programs the Democrats have planned to help lift folks out of the muck.
I’m willing to bet a fairly large sum (considering my income), that red state governors like Kruel Kristi will fight as hard as they can to keep their people in that muck up to their necks.
Donald Pay, lucky we don’t have Scott Walker here. Man, you’ve gotta check this out. More taxpayer theft by the grifters. Millions and millions of corrupted dollars, stolen. https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wisconsin-jobs-loophole-trump
Don’t think for one minute that GNOem is unaware of all of this easy pickings.
You want to hear about economic inequality? Rand Corp has carefully documented our income inequality and shows that $50 trillion, yes, TRILLION, has been upwardly redistributed from us to the few at the top.
1975 is the base year, the last year before the GOP and Bill Clinton began distorting our tax codes and banking laws to serve the wealthy. If you’re making the median of $36,000 in 2018, and our tax laws were still fair, in fact you’d report an income of $93,000 today. That’s how much of your money you’re being cheated out of today.
Listen, y’all know my attempts at math are always suspect due to my numbers disability, so take a look for yourselves.
https://bit.ly/34ghr7N
William jefferson Clinton was 4 years short of being Arkansas Guv in 1975, Debbo. :)
The article is talking about actions taken between 1975 and now.