If one thing is clear about American history and politics, it is this: The United States has never honored the idea that everyone is created equal. It has never valued every human life the same, and it’s hard to find a better recent reminder of this than the coronavirus pandemic, in which poor people of color have been more likely to be exposed, more likely to lose their jobs, and more likely to die. There are large groups of people about whom this country simply does not care, and there is not much hope that November’s election, however it shakes out, will represent the end of this shameful period.
Today, we will watch as Joe Biden and Mike Pence offer their versions of September 11–themed mourn-pomp as they “cross paths” in New York City. We will also spend another day hearing news about the immediate impact of the pandemic’s explosion, as it disproportionately affects people of color and the poor. Further tragedies await us in the weeks, months, and years to come, in which the disparate impact of this crisis will persist and widen those ever-greater economic gaps between rich and poor. But it will affect bodies, as well. It is too soon to know exactly what the long-term health impact will be—it is, after all, a novel virus—but it’s clear that there will be ongoing problems for some people who have had the virus, many of whom had symptoms for weeks on end. We do not know if lung scarring from the disease will be permanent, or if these patients will continue to be at higher risk for blood clots and strokes. The most recent thing we’ve learned about the virus is that we don’t have any idea what it’s doing to our hearts.
At least a third of college athletes who had coronavirus have myocarditis, an inflamed heart muscle, and a German study of 100 recently recovered coronavirus patients, most of whom recovered at home, found that 60 percent have ongoing myocardial inflammation. One third reported “ongoing exhaustion.” Many patients have exhibited neurological symptoms, such as confusion and delirium, which may have devastating long-term effects that we barely understand, and new evidence suggests the virus can enter the brain itself. The BBC noted in June that survivors of twentieth-century flu pandemics experienced a kind of lingering depression that left them “in a state of suspended animation”; Oliver Sacks described these sad patients as “insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies.”
Try to imagine how a health care system that is already awful, not to mention prejudiced and unequal, will handle this influx of newly burdened people. We are already very bad at preventing illness, and preventing deaths from those illnesses, compared to other countries. We have far more obesity, leading to complications like diabetes and heart disease. We also have hunger, which, contrary to the childlike assumptions of callous conservatives, is not a paradox: It is very possible for people to be both malnourished and overweight. And now think of how coronavirus has spread among the poor, people who are already less likely to have health insurance or be able to afford to see a doctor, as well as being more prone to such conditions.
These people will be less able to weather the long-term physical effects of the virus—if we don’t do something about it—but also the mental health effects. Such problems are already affecting Black and Latino people more. The state of mental health access in this country is a complete joke, an utter disaster, even for people with insurance. People will suffer and die without being able to see therapists, as they already do. In June, a quarter of young people reported experiencing suicidal thoughts in the last month.