COVID-19 is a Pothole

Imagine this: the world and time is a road and each country is a car on it.

There's a massive pothole on the road--I mean, the shatter-your-bones kind of massive but not an actual sinkhole yet, that you can still drive over it.

Some cars didn't know it was there, drove right over it and needed to stop and assess their car, maybe fix their alignment or even getting a new tire afterwards. They tell other cars about the pothole.

Some cars make plans to avoid it as much as possible, which may add several minutes to their commute and be otherwise inconvenient, but they make steps. Other countries say they have to save that bit of time or that it can't be that bad and take the same path. Of these cars, some will take the precaution of slowing down a bit, while others still careening toward it--certainly their car is tough enough to handle it.

The US A) had warning from other cars, B) decided to go down the same path for convenience, and C) hit that pothole fast and hard.

The pothole, though, isn't the only factor: if you have not kept good maintenance of your vehicle, the impact of the pothole will have a much greater effect. COVID-19 is a massive pothole, yes, but how much we suffer from it depends on how well we've maintained the systems of our country. COVID-19 has exacerbated and revealed the flaws in our undercarriage, the rust and degradation of a flawed healthcare system that fee-for-service and inflated prices has wrought upon us.

We're hitting this pothole hard, yes, and it has sidelined our car, but the extent of the damage isn't because of the pothole--we've got the car up on the lift and there's a lot more to see and fix, here, than we realized, even if the stereo and the security system were doing fine.

Some folks are insisting that the guy at the shop is just exaggerating, trying to fleece us, even while the engine sputters and the car always drifts to the right and the miles per gallon has gone down significantly and there's an odd ka-clunk every now and again. Continuing to ride in the car as it stands is dangerous--carbon monoxide is filtering into the passenger compartment, and some people will asphyxiate faster than others. Carbon monoxide poisoning hits depending on a few factors--is it worth letting the children die in the backseat? The cost of not fixing this problem is unquantifiable. We should not get back into the car until it is safe to do so. It is going to cost money, time, and effort to fix this--we will need to reallocate parts of our budget to get going again, just like we would in the household budget. There are reasonable ways to do this that do not take out from other car systems (that is to say, we can easily preserve social security, medicade, etc.). What good is a top-notch security system on a car that doesn't run safely?

We need to start by admitting there's something wrong with the car. We have to do better maintenance on our car. We need healthcare and infrastructure systems that have people at the heart of them. With healthcare primarily tied to jobs, then a wave of unemployment, AND exorbitant healthcare costs that have ballooned to ridiculous levels, we have a much clearer view of the engine than we did before.

We can do better. We must do better. The passengers are going to keep asphyxiating until we do and especially if we keep careening toward the same pothole again and again. COVID-19 did not cause all of these problems, rather it reveals the extent of the damage we have done to ourselves through negligence and poor prioritization.