More Americans have died of Covid since July 4th of this year than in the entire 20 years in which the US was embroiled in the Vietnam War. This data point is staggering both because it reveals the impact Covid continues to have in the US, but also because it is so underreported. If you read the New York Times or one of a handful of other well regarded American media, you can see the daily count of Covid hospitalizations and deaths, but otherwise this kind of information is not easy to find. Moreover, the rate of deaths, around 300 or more a day and 10,000 or more a month, shows no signs of abating. In fact, many experts expect that number to go up as we get deeper into winter.

The data on precisely which Americans are dying of Covid is more difficult to find, but the evidence suggests, predictably, that a substantial majority are some combination of older, struggling with preexisting conditions or unvaccinated. Regardless of who precisely is dying of Covid, the numbers demonstrate that it is still a very big problem in the US. However, Americans across the political spectrum seem to have arrived, through some combination of their own health, Covid fatigue or perhaps Covid discourse fatigue, at the untrue conclusion that Covid is over. It is now at the point where to mention Covid or a suggest that you or somebody else take a Covid related precaution is socially awkward, like making an off-color joke at a cocktail party.

It is true that most of us are happy to be finished with the endless, and often pointless, discussions about Covid as well as arguments about vaccines and masks that dominated 2020 and 2021. Similarly, many of us are able to go about our lives relatively normally, if we are fully vaccinated and take some basic precautions, with little fear of getting very sick even if we contract the virus. However, by acting as if Covid is finished and that even talking about it is somehow distasteful, we preclude a more important discussion.

Covid has had an enormous impact on American life. We are a country that has lost more than one million people to the disease, with millions more fighting long Covid, having to substantially change their lives because of preexisting conditions or struggling with anxiety, depression and a raft of other mental health conditions wrought by the pandemic. The pandemic has changed not only where the professional class chooses to work, but the economy more broadly with millions, for many different reasons, leaving the workforce. Similarly, the healthcare system has once again proven to be unable to meet the needs of the American people, not least because many are now stuck with unmanageable healthcare related debt from the pandemic.

To confront the impact of Covid is to confront those truths that it revealed about the American economic system, truths that go to the core of the problems with that system. Rather than have that confrontation, corporate and media leaders have focused on a set of issues labor shortages, supply chain problems, inflation and empty downtowns in many cities, as if Covid never existed at all, or in the case of the last issue, as if Covid is over and should not change anything.

The wiser, but more difficult, approach would be to recognize that Covid is an ongoing problem that continues to kill Americans at a pace that a few years ago would be seen as a major crisis, and that Covid is also a seminal event-an historic dividing line like a major war-after which things cannot go back to normal. If we were able to do that, the national discourse could begin to address what a post-Covid American economy might look like and what lessons we learned from the ongoing pandemic experience.

It is almost axiomatic that this is not going to happen. A country as divided, dysfunctional and mired in denial as the US is unable to pivot and begin to think creatively about the future. Specifically, we need policies, most obviously a substantial increase in the minimum wage, as well as programs to make health care, education and housing more affordable for working people, that will incentivize people to go back to work, and ensure that workers have a decent quality of life. Failing to find new solutions to the problems Covid exposed and exacerbated is not going to make these problems go away. Instead, they will fester-more people will check out of the work force and struggle to find decent affordable health care. This will not only make America less competitive, but it will guarantee the continued immiseration of millions of Americans. Alternately, we can pretend Covid has gone away, and maybe was never even here, but in doing that we ensure the longer term failure of the US.

Photo: cc/NIAID

Lincoln Mitchell