We all aspire to be more loving, to have more compassion and goodwill for all humanity. It is actually a really easy thing to declare that we have love for all people, that we wish everyone well.
Of course the difficulty comes when we move from the general to the specific. We can claim to love all the children of the world, yet harbor angry thoughts for the child kicking our airplane seat from behind us. We can declare our wish for the well-being of all people and yet wish ruin on that politician we cannot abide. Going from the generic to the specific is always the hard part. As Linus famously observes in Schulz’s Peanuts, “I love mankind – it’s people I can’t stand.”
This is the reason that in the practice of Metta Bhavana (cultivation of lovingkindness) we explicitly start with the specific. We start by practicing the generation of love and goodwill to four specific people. Our self, a (specific) friend, a (specific) neutral person and a (specific) enemy. It is only by working with the specific that we can understand the limits and edges of our ability to love. If you start with the general, with ‘all people,’ it is easy to convince yourself that you do truly love all beings. But ‘all beings’ includes all those specific people, the ones that give you trouble. That’s why the traditional form of Metta Bhavana is the way it is, and why it is such a powerful practice. Making the statement that you love all beings can be a platitude – working with all of the specifics can be a lifelong practice.
At the end of the traditional form of Metta meditation we do move from the specific and out to all beings. This part is traditionally known as the ‘sending to the ten directions.’ The ten directions here are the classical eight compass points, plus upward and downward. The point is to take what we have practiced for the specific people and apply the same to all beings – while still acknowledging that ‘all being’ includes billions of specific people and many trillions of specific creatures. All of whom are individuals. All of whom we wish to be well, happy and free from suffering.
Having practiced in this way we then continue to live our lives. And guess what? The people you will meet this week are part of ‘the ten directions.’ The saint, the politician, the criminal, the victim – all those you see or read about are part of those you covered in the ten directions. And so the specific becomes general, which becomes specific again in our lives.
Recognizing this cycle of specific – general – specific in our lives is one of the most powerful points of awakening any of us can have, and it is core to the practice of Metta Bhavana. I have linked on our website a fully-guided Metta Bhavana meditation, with some emphasis on sending to the ten directions. You can of course listen to it at any time, but a few of us have committed to listen together starting at 7pm PT on Sunday August 9th. You are welcome to join with us then if you wish.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, there has been a resurgence of state-sponsored voter suppression that is targeting communities of color “with almost surgical precision.” Already this year, states have purged their voter rolls, blocked rights restoration efforts, slashed polling place numbers, restricted early voting, allowed discriminatory voter ID laws and limited access to voting by mail.
There’s no question that these unjust voter suppression tactics are successful. Black and brown people, women and young people have historically been denied access to the ballot box, and this crucial election year is no exception. In response to the heightened need to ensure voting is safe and accessible for all people, especially in the Deep South, we launched the SPLC’s Vote Your Voice initiative to help support voter registration and mobilization efforts in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced the first round of Vote Your Voice grants to 12 voter outreach organizations across the Deep South as part of the $30 million voter mobilization initiative. Each organization submitted an innovative and exhaustive proposal to boost voter registration, education and mobilization in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
The organizations announced below have records of achievement in their communities registering, educating and mobilizing voters of color, young people, low-income people and returning citizens, and we are thrilled to support their work and engage more people in civil participation in the South.
Click here to read more about the 12 Vote Your Voice grantee organizations who will be working to empower voters of color and ensure more voters in the Deep South will have a say in the direction of our country as we deal with the pandemic fallout and reckon with injustices.
We are also excited to announce that the SPLC and the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta opened the application process today for a second round of grants across Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
The magnitude of social justice problems facing communities of color, especially in the Deep South, can often feel overwhelming. We are proud to support trusted and successful community organizations in a serious effort to leverage political power through the ballot box to promote community empowerment and self-determination in a way that leads to a more equitable and just society.
Thank you for your commitment to this work — your dedication to fighting voter suppression and white supremacy helped make the Vote Your Voice initiative possible.
In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
As is seen all over the headlines, there’s a rush to get students and teachers back to school. We say come the fall but the reality is most schools go back over summer. This is the same summer that has shown significant spikes in Covid-19 cases and increased death rates of all ages. The worsening of this situation is by no means the fault of schools, but instead is a direct result of the government’s lack of trust in professionals and inability to act. There’s a pressure to get students back in schools to get our economy ‘back to normal’ and allow parents to go to work. The justifications given for this to happen are often pretexts for the need for child-care. What is happening is that we continue (yes, I mean continue) to normalize children dying for the sake of the economy.
While I’d like nothing more than to be reunited with my students, I understand that the most vulnerable students are at risk if we go back to in person learning. One thing we cannot argue is that academics are more easily recovered than a human life.
If you are eager for schools to be back in session because you argue that the most vulnerable students are at risk of falling behind, you are absolutely correct. However, if you have not been advocating for these students prior to this, you need to consider the whole picture. We talk about the ‘achievement gap’ and ‘opportunity gap’ that exists between BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) students and white students, rich and poor, able-bodied and those with disabilities, heterosexual, cisgender students and LGBTQIA+ students, and we have labeled these students who are given less opportunity as at risk or vulnerable. If you have not always advocated for equity in schools and social justice, you need to examine your motives for doing so now to justify going back to school. If your argument is that re-opening schools is necessary to not widen the opportunity gap, you must also acknowledge that in-person schooling contributes to the opportunity gap.
If we claim to need to go back to school for these students, we must acknowledge that BIPOC populations are the most vulnerable in our school system and act on that knowledge. We need to be fully committed to seeking educational justice. Here are ten ideas as to how to support ‘vulnerable’ students.
1.Advocate for socially just teaching, ethnic studies, and rewriting entire curriculums. Many BIPOC students are disadvantaged in schools because the curriculum is whitewashed, Eurocentric and excludes the history, culture and representation of BIPOC students. Libraries and learning needs to be inclusive of all students. Schools need to be a safe place that celebrates the history and excellence of BIPOC, immigrants, LGBTQIA+, homeless, those with learning disabilities, etc. Vidhya Nagarajan for NPR (2017) best represents the many students left out of the system of education in the drawing above. We need to focus on the intersectionality of education and inclusion of all students in the classroom, curriculum and staff. If you are worried about students learning, you need to be worried about what they are being taught. Read more by experts about social justice and anti-racist teaching in the following article: http://neatoday.org/2019/01/22/why-social-justice-in-schools-matters/.
2. Fully fund schools and home libraries for students. Give students access to all the same materials and supplies that their peers have. For this to happen that includes having materials and supplies that represent them. Fully fund libraries that focus on representation of BIPOC students and cultures. Students need access to these materials at school and at home to be successful. Renaissance Learning (2015) found that students who read less than 15 min a day at home were not able to make reading growth, despite classroom interventions. We need all students to have access to quality books, which might include funding more libraries in low-income neighborhoods so they are walking distance from schools or students’ homes. If you’re worried about student learning, you have to be worried about access to learning materials and literacy.
In the article “Why White School Districts Have so Much Money” Lombardo of NPR explores research that concludes that predominately white districts receive $23 billion more in funding than schools with mostly BIPOC students. Based on their research, the national average of school funding is $1,600 less per student for districts serving mostly BIPOC students, while districts that have mostly poor, white students only receive $130 less per student than the national average (Lombardo, 2019). Funding cannot be linked to housing around the school. More than half of our students in the US attend schools that are “racially segregated” (Lombardo, 2019). It’s as if Brown v. Board of Education (1954) never happened.
3. Implement restorative justice practices into schools. Train teachers and staff in anti-racist practices and how to help change behaviors, not punish them. Hold schools accountable for the criminalization of BIPOC students and longterm impact on their lives. If you care about student learning, you have to care about suspension rates that take them out of the classroom and how it is systemically racist. Read more on the African American Policy Forum about how suspension rates disproportionately impact Black students: https://aapf.org/school-to-prison-pipeline.
4. Eradicate standardized testing. Tests are also biased toward white students and not to mention, a huge use of time that might be better spent another way. Students from 3rd grade up take a state standardized test that can take over a month to complete. That’s a MONTH of learning time they lose each year to be able to take a test. My first graders took 6 benchmarks every trimester, which took them about 2-3 weeks to complete. This is 3x a year. By the way, the 3rd grade and up take these benchmarks, in addition to the state test. An immense amount of time is spent on testing! No amount of data is worth losing that much learning time. If you are worried about student learning, you need to be worried about how much time is spent testing students and what those scores mean for schools, tracking, expectation value, etc.
5. Fully fund STEAM in schools (science, technology, engineering, arts and math). I have worked in countless schools in low income areas that do not have funding for things like science and hands-on activities. These things are often paid for by the teachers themselves. Between 79% (USA Today, 2019) and 94% of teachers (Vox, 2019) spend their own money on classroom supplies. This is why places like Donors Choose exist. My last principal actually told the teachers, don’t worry about teaching social studies or science, these kids just need reading. I was told if I get 40% at grade level, that’s the target. The fallacy in this thinking is that by over focusing on literacy, students then lack the content knowledge and experiences to use as background knowledge for reading and writing. “Put simply, the more you know about a topic, the easier it is to read a text, understand it, and retain the information. Previous studies (Alexander, Kulikowich, & Schulze, 1994; Shapiro, 2004) have shown that background knowledge plays an enormous role in reading comprehension (Hirsch, 2003)” (Neuman, Kaefer, Pinkham). If you are worried about student learning, you need to be focused on all content areas and funding for STEAM in schools.
6. Early childhood education needs to be prioritized in our society and offered at no cost to families. This is the foundation of schooling and if only those who can afford preschool attend, they will be starting off Kinder with a leg up on everyone who wasn’t able to go to pre-school. If you’re worried about student learning, you have to know where the gap starts and address it.
7. After school programs should be free and widespread. If students are supposed to get a leg up, they need to build up experiences and background knowledge. They should be active in elective classes and sports. These need to be free and fully funded. If we want justice in our schools, we need to give all students the opportunity to follow their passions, not just those of families that can afford it. If you are worried about student learning, you need to be worried about opportunities to follow their interests outside of school.
8. Move schools to year-round schedules. Having time off in the summer disproportionately impacts the students that are most vulnerable. This infographic made by LoShiavo (2019) illustrates it best. Source: https://www.jaxpubliclibrary.org/ilovejpl/stellar-summer-reading-stats-2019 We are not farmers anymore. We can go to school year round with shorter breaks for students in between that don’t put them at risk of falling behind. If you are worried about student learning, you need to be worried about summer slide.
9. Focus on recruiting, retaining and supporting diverse educators, especially BIPOC teachers, without placing the burden to be the only ones teaching anti-racism. There is essentially no diversity in education, which is irresponsible. We need to recruit and retain diverse teachers. This starts with affordable teaching programs, paying student teachers (that’s right we had to work for half a year with no pay), eliminating the cost of examinations to become a teacher (the CBEST, CSETS and RICA probably cost me a $1,000 for both credentials). This also means that induction should be free (as it was) which is a program new teachers often have to pay out of pocket (depending on their district it’s $1-3k) to “clear” their credential. These systems keep the status quo in place of who can afford to become a teacher. This is called systemic racism. Recruit and retain professionals who are non-white because our world is diverse, and students (and staff) deserve and need to learn about diversity of thought and experience. The next step in retaining teachers is by training all teachers in anti-racist education. More on this subject by experts here: https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/08/889112818/what-it-would-take-to-get-an-effective-anti-racist-education. If you’re worried about student learning, you have to care about how schools in the US are systemically racist against BIPOC students and do not retain diverse educators.
10. Fully fund classrooms, and pay teachers for all the time they work. Of course I think teachers deserve higher salaries, however, at the current moment they are not even being paid for the actual work it takes to teach. As a teacher, I’m given one 30 minute period per week when the students receive art, 1 hour after school on our short day (if our meeting doesn’t go over) and 10 minutes in the mornings from when I am supposed to arrive and when I have to pick up students. How then can I adequately plan and prepare lessons for my students, meet with families, address student needs outside of the classroom, hang student work, clean and sanitize materials, respond to office needs, collaborate and also be a human that uses the restroom and what not. I work 2-4 hours a day outside of my contracted time. If not a raise, fine, at least pay teachers for the time it actually takes to do the job. Retaining teachers is also a huge indicator in building relationships and establishing trust between staff and students. If you’re worried about students learning, you have to give students teachers that are treated as professionals. Number one this will give more time for teachers to work on improving their craft, creating more meaningful culturally responsive lessons and when the teacher isn’t frazzled or stressed, the classroom environment benefits from this positively.
While this is lengthy, this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as needs for schools to become just, anti-racist, and equitable places. I agree that distance learning and virtual teaching disadvantages certain populations of students at higher rates. I am not denying this or saying that it is permissible or justifiable. I am saying this, being IN school also has disadvantages for these same populations of students. You cannot address one without the other. If you are arguing that we need to go back to school to help close the opportunity gaps for our students, then you need to also fully advocate for and fund #1-10. Chances are, for the people who are already advocating for #1-10, they also advocate for schools to stay closed until it’s safe because they understand that the schools with less funding have fewer means to provide safe and healthy learning environments for their students. Going back to in-person learning will disproportionately expose the students who attend under funded schools that already struggle to keep classrooms clean and stocked with materials. I truly believe there is nothing that my fellow educators wouldn’t do for their students’ well-being but going back to school isn’t for students’ well-being… is it?
President Trump at the White House coronavirus briefing on Thursday.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times
With each passing day it becomes more obvious how unlucky we are that one of the worst crises in American history coincides with Donald Trump’s presidency. To get out of this crisis with the least loss of life and least damage to our economy, we need a president who can steer a science-based, nonpartisan debate through the hellish ethical, economic and environmental trade-offs we have to make.
We need a president who is a cross between F.D.R., Justice Brandeis and Jonas Salk. We got a president who is a cross between Dr. Phil, Dr. Strangelove and Dr. Seuss.
Sure, Trump isn’t the only one sowing division in our society, but as president he has a megaphone like no one else, so when he spews his politics of division, and suggests disinfectants as cures, he is not only eroding our society’s physical immunity to the coronavirus but also eroding what futurist Marina Gorbis calls our “cognitive immunity” — our ability to filter out science from quackery and facts from fabrications.
As a result, the Trump daily briefing has itself become a public health hazard.
If we don’t have a president who can harmonize our need to protect ourselves from the coronavirus and our need to get back to work — as well as harmonize our need to protect the planet’s ecosystems and our need for economic growth — we are doomed.
Because this virus was actually triggered by our polarization from the natural world. And it will destroy us — physically and economically — if we stay locked in a polarized, binary argument about lives versus livelihoods.
Here is why: When you listen to Trump, one of his consistent themes is that everything was just “perfect” with our economy until — out of nowhere — this black swan, called Covid-19, showed up from China and wrecked it all. It’s true, this virus did come out of Wuhan, China, but it was anything but a black swan that no one could have expected. It was actually “a black elephant.”
The term “black elephant” was coined by environmentalist Adam Sweidan. It’s a cross between “a black swan” — an unlikely, unexpected event with enormous ramifications — and the “elephant in the room” — a looming disaster that is visible to everyone, yet no one wants to address.
Covid-19 was a black elephant. It is the logical outcome of our increasingly destructive wars against nature.
As Johan Rockström, chief scientist at Conservation International, explains: “When you simultaneously hunt for wildlife and push development into natural ecosystems — destroying natural habitats — the natural balance of species collapses due to loss of top predators and other iconic species, leading to an abundance of more generalized species adapted to live in human dominated habitats. These are rats, bats and some primates — which together host 75 percent of all known zoonotic viruses to date, and who can survive and multiply in destroyed human dominated habitats.”
As we humans have become more numerous and concentrated in cities, and as deforestation has brought these generalized species closer to us — and as countries like China, Vietnam and others in central Africa tolerated wet markets where these virus-laden species were mixed with domesticated meats — we’re seeing ever more zoonotic diseases spreading from animals to people. Their names are SARS, MERS, Ebola, bird flu, and swine flu — and Covid-19.
China, in particular, has a lot to answer for. It banned wet markets in one province after SARS in 2003, but then allowed them to reopen after SARS passed — and that apparently brought us Covid-19 out of Wuhan. (Shamefully, China reportedly still has not shut down wet markets selling wildlife.)
Add globalization to this and you have the perfect ingredients for more pandemics. We need to find a much more harmonious balance between economic growth and our ecosystems.
The same kind of harmonic approach has to be brought to our current debate about reopening the economy. One way to get there was proposed by Graham Allison, a national security expert at Harvard.
Allison wrote that we’re having this important debate about our health and economic future in an incredibly uncoordinated way. Instead, we should have federal government experts on one team offering their approach — and a Team B of independent medical, economic, public health, data and strategic analysts offering an alternative approach. And then go for the best synthesis.
For instance, Allison observed: “If we concluded that an identified group of a quarter of the population face an unacceptable risk of death from coronavirus, but that for the other 75 percent, with appropriate precautions like social distancing and masks, face no greater risk than other risks of death we accepted before coronavirus, would it be possible to design a response that protected the most vulnerable while simultaneously reopening most of the economy for others?”
As an example of Team B thinking, Graham cited the work of Dr. David Katz, a public health expert who helped kick off the debate about how to harmonize protecting the most vulnerable and opening the economy to those least at risk in an essay he wrote in The New York Times on March 20 — and in a follow-up interview we did together.
Five weeks later — and fresh off three days as a volunteer emergency room doctor in the Bronx — Katz still believes that is possible. He explained to me why, starting with what he found in the emergency ward.
“You might think that health professionals are at one extreme of opinion, concerned only about the virus and favoring locking everything down, but that was not the view I encountered,” said Katz. “The view was far more centrist: respect for the infection, but equal respect for the high cost of closing down everything — to their patients, of course, but also to themselves and their families. Many were acutely concerned about layoffs, unemployment, and real desperation affecting siblings or close friends.”
That is why, Katz insists, we have to avoid minimizing the degree to which mass unemployment, poverty, hunger and despair will devastate people if the economy remains virtually shut down. At the same time, we can’t just submit to protesters demanding their governors open everything back up indiscriminately, without data or a comprehensive health strategy,
“The moment you stop respecting this virus, it will kill someone you love,” he said.
The best strategy, argues Katz, starts with what the numbers are telling us: “More and more data are telling us that Covid-19 is two completely different diseases in different populations. It is severe and potentially lethal to the old, the chronically ill and those with pre-existing conditions. It is, however, rarely life-threatening, often mild — and often even asymptomatic — among those under 50 or 60 in generally good health.”
While we still don’t yet have a perfect understanding of how the virus works — and we need to corroborate the patterns we’re seeing through more random sampling of the U.S. population both for infection and immunity — if these patterns are confirmed, then the proper strategy, argued Katz, is one of “total harm minimization” that saves the most lives and health through “vertical interdiction.”
“That means sheltering the vulnerable, while allowing those who can return to the world most safely to do so — thereby restoring the economy, supply chains, and services, while cultivating the collective protection of herd immunity that leads to the ‘all clear,’” said Katz. “That’s how we get our lives back without waiting on the long and uncertain timeline of vaccine development.”
Of course, we’ll need an army of public health workers to keep doing testing and contact tracing so we can adapt to new data, limit breakouts and protect those most likely to die or be badly harmed from Covid-19.
The bottom line is that Mother Nature has been telling us something huge in this crisis: “You let everything get out of balance and go to extremes. You ravaged my ecosystems and unleashed this virus. You let political extremism ravage your body politic. You need to get back into balance, and that starts with using the immune system that I endowed you with.”
Herd immunity, which kicks in after about 60 percent of the population is exposed to and recovers from the virus, concluded Katz, “has historically been nature’s way of ending pandemics. We need to bend with her forces, while concentrating our health services and social services on protecting those most vulnerable who need to stay sheltered until there is a vaccine.”
The U.S. president’s comments prompted doctors and the makers of household disinfectants to issue statements urging people not to ingest or inject cleaning products.
It’s a weird time we’re living through, when a trip the grocery store is about our only opportunity to go someplace different than hour house, and every grocery trip feels a bit like entering the arena of The Hunger Games.
Our grocery store workers are certainly underpaid heroes of the coronavirus era. Every day, they go to work to make sure we all have food to eat, putting their own health at risk to do so. And unfortunately, the stress and strain of pandemic panic and economic uncertainty have led some people to treat these heroes with far less respect than they deserve.
A grocery store manager (unnamed in this post, but perhaps originally Jason Baldwin) shared a 20-point list of things we need to know when we’re venturing out to the grocery store right now. The post, republished by Roy Allen Stagg, has been shared more than 580,000 times because it contains blunt truths we all need to hear.
It reads:
I manage a grocery store.
Here’s some things everyone should know:
1. I don’t have toilet paper
2. I don’t have sanitizer
3. I run out of milk, eggs and meat daily
4. I promise if it’s out on the shelf … it’s not in a hidden corner of our back room
Those are the predictable ones, now for the real stuff:
5. I have been doing this for 25 years I did not forget how to order product
6. I did not cause the warehouse to be out of product
7. I schedule as much help as I have, including many TMs working TONS of overtime to help YOU
8. I am sorry there are lines at the check-out lanes
Now for the really important stuff:
9. My team puts themselves in harm’s way every day so you can buy groceries
10. My team works tirelessly to get product on the floor for you to buy
11. My team is exhausted
12. My team is scared of getting sick
13. My team is human and do not possess an antivirus… they are in just as much danger as you are. (Arguably more) But they show up to work everyday just so you can buy groceries
14. My team is tired
15. My team is very underappreciated
16. My team is exposed to more people who are potentially infected in one hour than most of you will in a week (medical community excluded, thank you for all that you do!)
17. My team is abused all day by customers who have no idea how ignorant they are
18. My team disinfects every surface possible, everyday, just so you can come in grab a wipe from the dispenser, wipe the handle and throw the used wipe in the cart or on the ground and leave it there… so my team can throw it in the trash for you later
19. My team wonders if you wash your re-usable bags, that you force us to touch, that are clearly dirty and have more germs on them than our shopping carts do
20. My team more than earns their breaks, lunches and days off. And if that means you wait longer I am sorry.
The last thing I will say is this:
“The next time you are in a grocery store, please pause and think about what you are saying and how you are treating the people you encounter. They are the reason you are able to buy toilet paper, sanitizer, milk, eggs and meat.”
“If the store you go to is out of an item.. maybe find the neighbor or friend that bought enough for a year … there are hundreds of them… and ask them to spare 1 or 2. They caused the problem to begin with…”
“And lastly, please THANK the people who helped you. They don’t have to come to work!”
We owe our grocery store workers a huge debt of gratitude and an enormous amount of respect. If this pandemic is teaching us anything, it’s that we rely far more on people in these positions than we’ve probably ever thought about, so we should absolutely be treating them with dignity—at the very least. If you think you’re stressed, imagine how these workers feel. If you feel frustrated, imagine how these workers feel. If you’re afraid you might get sick, imagine how these workers feel.
Care and compassion go a long way. Let’s give our grocery store workers an extra measure of love and kindness, as our ability to keep living our lives at home literally depends on them.
Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the nation’s psyche.
A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”
So, now what? In the late hours of last Wednesday, which now feels like the distant past, I was talking about the pandemic with a pregnant friend who was days away from her due date. We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.
As we’ll see, Gen C’s lives will be shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks, and by the losses we suffer as a result. But first, a brief reckoning. On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.
“No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,” says Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at the Boston University School of Medicine. More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza, the new coronavirus is also stealthier, spreading from one host to another for several days before triggering obvious symptoms. To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.
As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.
The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country. Overstretched hospitals became overwhelmed. Basic protective equipment, such as masks, gowns, and gloves, began to run out. Beds will soon follow, as will the ventilators that provide oxygen to patients whose lungs are besieged by the virus.
With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency. That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition; some worried hospitals have bought out large quantities of supplies, in the way that panicked consumers have bought out toilet paper.
Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear. Instead of springing into action, America sat idle.
Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”
I. The Next Months
Having fallen behind, it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April. As of last weekend, the nation had 17,000 confirmed cases, but the actual number was probably somewhere between 60,000 and 245,000. Numbers are now starting to rise exponentially: As of Wednesday morning, the official case count was 54,000, and the actual case count is unknown. Health-care workers are already seeing worrying signs: dwindling equipment, growing numbers of patients, and doctors and nurses who are themselves becoming infected.
Italy and Spain offer grim warnings about the future. Hospitals are out of room, supplies, and staff. Unable to treat or save everyone, doctors have been forced into the unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are most likely to survive, while letting others die. The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study
released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one. By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans, notwithstanding those who will indirectly die as hospitals are unable to care for the usual slew of heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. This is the worst-case scenario. To avert it, four things need to happen—and quickly.
In the U.S., the Strategic National Stockpile—a national larder of medical equipment—is already being deployed, especially to the hardest-hit states. The stockpile is not inexhaustible, but it can buy some time. Donald Trump could use that time to invoke the Defense Production Act, launching a wartime effort in which American manufacturers switch to making medical equipment. But after invoking the act last Wednesday, Trump has failed to actually use it, reportedly due to lobbying from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and heads of major corporations.
Some manufacturers are already rising to the challenge, but their efforts are piecemeal and unevenly distributed. “One day, we’ll wake up to a story of doctors in City X who are operating with bandanas, and a closet in City Y with masks piled into it,” says Ali Khan, the dean of public health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
This agency can also coordinate the second pressing need: a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests. Those tests have been slow to arrive because of five separate shortages: of masks to protect people administering the tests; of nasopharyngeal swabs for collecting viral samples; of extraction kits for pulling the virus’s genetic material out of the samples; of chemical reagents that are part of those kits; and of trained people who can give the tests. Many of these shortages are, again, due to strained supply chains. The U.S. relies on three manufacturers for extraction reagents, providing redundancy in case any of them fails—but all of them failed in the face of unprecedented global demand. Meanwhile, Lombardy, Italy, the hardest-hit place in Europe, houses one of the largest manufacturers of nasopharyngeal swabs.
Some shortages are being addressed. The FDA is now moving quickly to approve tests developed by private labs. At least one can deliver results in less than an hour, potentially allowing doctors to know if the patient in front of them has COVID-19. The country “is adding capacity on a daily basis,” says Kelly Wroblewski of the Association of Public Health Laboratories.
On March 6, Trump said that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” That was (and still is) untrue, and his own officials were quick to correct him. Regardless, anxious people still flooded into hospitals, seeking tests that did not exist. “People wanted to be tested even if they weren’t symptomatic, or if they sat next to someone with a cough,” says Saskia Popescu of George Mason University, who works to prepare hospitals for pandemics. Others just had colds, but doctors still had to use masks to examine them, burning through their already dwindling supplies. “It really stressed the health-care system,” Popescu says. Even now, as capacity expands, tests must be used carefully. The first priority, says Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, is to test health-care workers and hospitalized patients, allowing hospitals to quell any ongoing fires. Only later, once the immediate crisis is slowing, should tests be deployed in a more widespread way. “This isn’t just going to be: Let’s get the tests out there!” Inglesby says.
These measures will take time, during which the pandemic will either accelerate beyond the capacity of the health system or slow to containable levels. Its course—and the nation’s fate—now depends on the third need, which is social distancing. Think of it this way: There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. Group B must now “flatten the curve” by physically isolating themselves from other people to cut off chains of transmission. Given the slow fuse of COVID-19, to forestall the future collapse of the health-care system, these seemingly drastic steps must be taken immediately, before they feel proportionate, and they must continue for several weeks.
In these moments, when the good of all hinges on the sacrifices of many, clear coordination matters—the fourth urgent need. The importance of social distancing must be impressed upon a public who must also be reassured and informed. Instead, Trump has repeatedly played down the problem, telling America that “we have it very well under control” when we do not, and that cases were “going to be down to close to zero” when they were rising. In some cases, as with his claims about ubiquitous testing, his misleading gaffes have deepened the crisis. He has even touted unproven medications.
Away from the White House press room, Trump has apparently been listening to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan on new epidemics, and now sits on the COVID-19 task force that meets with Trump roughly every other day. “He’s got his own style, let’s leave it at that,” Fauci told me, “but any kind of recommendation that I have made thus far, the substance of it, he has listened to everything.”
But Trump already seems to be wavering. In recent days, he has signaled that he is prepared to backtrack on social-distancing policies in a bid to protect the economy. Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick.
A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care. There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.
If Trump stays the course, if Americans adhere to social distancing, if testing can be rolled out, and if enough masks can be produced, there is a chance that the country can still avert the worst predictions about COVID-19, and at least temporarily bring the pandemic under control. No one knows how long that will take, but it won’t be quick. “It could be anywhere from four to six weeks to up to three months,” Fauci said, “but I don’t have great confidence in that range.”
II. The Endgame
Even a perfect response won’t end the pandemic. As long as the virus persists somewhere, there’s a chance that one infected traveler will reignite fresh sparks in countries that have already extinguished their fires. This is already happening in China, Singapore, and other Asian countries that briefly seemed to have the virus under control. Under these conditions, there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.
The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.
The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting. But it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems. The United Kingdom initially seemed to consider this herd-immunity strategy, before backtracking when models revealed the dire consequences. The U.S. now seems to be considering it too.
The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.
It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.
But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones. The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They’ll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t cause severe side effects. They’ll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.
“Even if it works, they don’t have an easy way to manufacture it at a massive scale,” said Seth Berkley of Gavi. That’s because Moderna is using a new approach to vaccination. Existing vaccines work by providing the body with inactivated or fragmented viruses, allowing the immune system to prep its defenses ahead of time. By contrast, Moderna’s vaccine comprises a sliver of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic material—its RNA. The idea is that the body can use this sliver to build its own viral fragments, which would then form the basis of the immune system’s preparations. This approach works in animals, but is unproven in humans. By contrast, French scientists are trying to modify the existing measles vaccine using fragments of the new coronavirus. “The advantage of that is that if we needed hundreds of doses tomorrow, a lot of plants in the world know how to do it,” Berkley said. No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people’s arms.
It’s likely, then, that the new coronavirus will be a lingering part of American life for at least a year, if not much longer. If the current round of social-distancing measures works, the pandemic may ebb enough for things to return to a semblance of normalcy. Offices could fill and bars could bustle. Schools could reopen and friends could reunite. But as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.
Much about the coming years, including the frequency, duration, and timing of social upheavals, depends on two properties of the virus, both of which are currently unknown. First: seasonality. Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for SARS-CoV-2, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect. “Much of the world is waiting anxiously to see what—if anything—the summer does to transmission in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Maia Majumder of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.
Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer. Assuming that SARS-CoV-2 lies somewhere in the middle, people who recover from their encounters might be protected for a couple of years. To confirm that, scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.
Scientists can use the periods between those bouts to develop antiviral drugs—although such drugs are rarely panaceas, and come with possible side effects and the risk of resistance. Hospitals can stockpile the necessary supplies. Testing kits can be widely distributed to catch the virus’s return as quickly as possible. There’s no reason that the U.S. should let SARS-CoV-2 catch it unawares again, and thus no reason that social-distancing measures need to be deployed as broadly and heavy-handedly as they now must be. As Aaron E. Carroll and Ashish Jha recently wrote, “We can keep schools and businesses open as much as possible, closing them quickly when suppression fails, then opening them back up again once the infected are identified and isolated. Instead of playing defense, we could play more offense.”
Whether through accumulating herd immunity or the long-awaited arrival of a vaccine, the virus will find spreading explosively more and more difficult. It’s unlikely to disappear entirely. The vaccine may need to be updated as the virus changes, and people may need to get revaccinated on a regular basis, as they currently do for the flu. Models suggest that the virus might simmer around the world, triggering epidemics every few years or so. “But my hope and expectation is that the severity would decline, and there would be less societal upheaval,” Kissler says. In this future, COVID-19 may become like the flu is today—a recurring scourge of winter. Perhaps it will eventually become so mundane that even though a vaccine exists, large swaths of Gen C won’t bother getting it, forgetting how dramatically their world was molded by its absence.
III. The Aftermath
The cost of reaching that point, with as few deaths as possible, will be enormous. As my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote, the economy is experiencing a shock “more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced.” About one in five people in the United States have lost working hours or jobs. Hotels are empty. Airlines are grounding flights. Restaurants and other small businesses are closing. Inequalities will widen: People with low incomes will be hardest-hit by social-distancing measures, and most likely to have the chronic health conditions that increase their risk of severe infections. Diseases have destabilized cities and societies many times over, “but it hasn’t happened in this country in a very long time, or to quite the extent that we’re seeing now,” says Elena Conis, a historian of medicine at UC Berkeley. “We’re far more urban and metropolitan. We have more people traveling great distances and living far from family and work.”
After infections begin ebbing, a secondary pandemic of mental-health problems will follow. At a moment of profound dread and uncertainty, people are being cut off from soothing human contact. Hugs, handshakes, and other social rituals are now tinged with danger. People with anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder are struggling. Elderly people, who are already excluded from much of public life, are being asked to distance themselves even further, deepening their loneliness. Asian people are suffering racist insults, fueled by a president who insists on labeling the new coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” Incidents of domestic violence and child abuse are likely to spike as people are forced to stay in unsafe homes. Children, whose bodies are mostly spared by the virus, may endure mental trauma that stays with them into adulthood.
After the pandemic, people who recover from COVID-19 might be shunned and stigmatized, as were survivors of Ebola, SARS, and HIV. Health-care workers will take time to heal: One to two years after SARS hit Toronto, people who dealt with the outbreak were still less productive and more likely to be experiencing burnout and post-traumatic stress. People who went through long bouts of quarantine will carry the scars of their experience. “My colleagues in Wuhan note that some people there now refuse to leave their homes and have developed agoraphobia,” says Steven Taylor of the University of British Columbia, who wrote The Psychology of Pandemics.
But “there is also the potential for a much better world after we get through this trauma,” says Richard Danzig of the Center for a New American Security. Already, communities are finding new ways of coming together, even as they must stay apart. Attitudes to health may also change for the better. The rise of HIV and AIDS “completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic,” Conis says. “The use of condoms became normalized. Testing for STDs became mainstream.” Similarly, washing your hands for 20 seconds, a habit that has historically been hard to enshrine even in hospitals, “may be one of those behaviors that we become so accustomed to in the course of this outbreak that we don’t think about them,” Conis adds.
Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements. “This is the first time in my lifetime that I’ve heard someone say, ‘Oh, if you’re sick, stay home,’” says Adia Benton, an anthropologist at Northwestern University. Perhaps the nation will learn that preparedness isn’t just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but also about fair labor policies and a stable and equal health-care system. Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose America’s social immune system, and that this system has been suppressed.
Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs. Having internalized years of anti-terrorism messaging following 9/11, Americans resolved to not live in fear. But SARS-CoV-2 has no interest in their terror, only their cells.
Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too. Citizens who saw China as a distant, different place, where bats are edible and authoritarianism is acceptable, failed to consider that they would be next or that they wouldn’t be ready. (China’s response to this crisis had its own problems, but that’s for another time.) “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”
Veterans of past epidemics have long warned that American society is trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. After every crisis—anthrax, SARS, flu, Ebola—attention is paid and investments are made. But after short periods of peacetime, memories fade and budgets dwindle. This trend transcends red and blue administrations. When a new normal sets in, the abnormal once again becomes unimaginable. But there is reason to think that COVID-19 might be a disaster that leads to more radical and lasting change.
The other major epidemics of recent decades either barely affected the U.S. (SARS, MERS, Ebola), were milder than expected (H1N1 flu in 2009), or were mostly limited to specific groups of people (Zika, HIV). The COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, is affecting everyone directly, changing the nature of their everyday life. That distinguishes it not only from other diseases, but also from the other systemic challenges of our time. When an administration prevaricates on climate change, the effects won’t be felt for years, and even then will be hard to parse. It’s different when a president says that everyone can get a test, and one day later, everyone cannot. Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.
After 9/11, the world focused on counterterrorism. After COVID-19, attention may shift to public health. Expect to see a spike in funding for virology and vaccinology, a surge in students applying to public-health programs, and more domestic production of medical supplies. Expect pandemics to top the agenda at the United Nations General Assembly. Anthony Fauci is now a household name. “Regular people who think easily about what a policewoman or firefighter does finally get what an epidemiologist does,” says Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Such changes, in themselves, might protect the world from the next inevitable disease. “The countries that had lived through SARS had a public consciousness about this that allowed them to leap into action,” said Ron Klain, the former Ebola czar. “The most commonly uttered sentence in America at the moment is, ‘I’ve never seen something like this before.’ That wasn’t a sentence anyone in Hong Kong uttered.” For the U.S., and for the world, it’s abundantly, viscerally clear what a pandemic can do.
The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions. Such dynamics will be pivotal in the coming months, says Ilan Goldenberg, a foreign-policy expert at the Center for a New American Security. “The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes.”
One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero. During the second term of his presidency, the U.S. turns further inward and pulls out of NATO and other international alliances, builds actual and figurative walls, and disinvests in other nations. As Gen C grows up, foreign plagues replace communists and terrorists as the new generational threat.
One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation. Buoyed by steady investments and an influx of the brightest minds, the health-care workforce surges. Gen C kids write school essays about growing up to be epidemiologists. Public health becomes the centerpiece of foreign policy. The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.
In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.
ED YONG is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science.
In February 2020, we received multiple inquiries from readers about the veracity of social media posts and news articles which claimed that the U.S. economy had added 1.5 million more jobs during former President Barack Obama’s final three years in office, than it did during President Donald Trump’s first three years.
On Feb. 17, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York, tweeted that Obama had “created 1.5 million more jobs in his last 3 years than Donald Trump has in his first 3 years.”
Earlier, the left-leaning Democratic Coalition group posted a link to a Yahoo! News article with the headline “Trump’s First 3 Years Created 1.5 Million Fewer Jobs Than Obama’s Last 3,” adding “FACT: New figures from Trump’s own Department of Labor show that 6.6 million new jobs were created in the first 36 months of Trump’s tenure, compared with 8.1 million in the final 36 months of Obama’s ― a decline of 19% under Trump.”
You can only do this for so long. (Photo: Mick Tinbergen/Wikimedia Commons)
The oldest baby boomers have just turned 70, and most can drive to their birthday parties. They’re being followed by 70 million other boomers, all happily motoring along. Their parents? Not so good these days. Janet Morrissey of The New York Times looks at the issue of transportation for senior citizens and sees a problem: lack of transportation.
It’s no longer enough to call a taxi or regular car service and hope that frail seniors can get in and out — or through the entrance of a doctor’s office on their own as the driver speeds off. For people requiring oxygen tanks and wheelchairs, it’s an even bigger challenge, and long waiting periods are often required to arrange for specially equipped vehicles.
Morrissey is interviewing people in their 80s and 90s but recognizes that this will be a growing problem.
“It’s going to become a massive phenomena,[sic]” said Ken Dychtwald, founder and chief executive of Age Wave, a consulting firm specializing in age-related issues. “This is an unmet need that’s going to be in the tens of millions of people.”
I read the article with increasing incredulity as she talks about new startups like RoundTrip and Circulation that provide rides. Reading it makes me want to scream in all bold capital letters: THIS ISN’T A TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM. IT’S AN URBAN DESIGN PROBLEM! Only once, in the entire article, did it mention that we are in this mess because of the great suburban experiment of designing our world around cars.
One woman who cannot drive because of a broken elbow complains:
“In the suburbs, there is no public transportation whatsoever,” she said. “When you don’t have access to public transportation and your spouse is working and your children are no longer home, it’s a little difficult to get to your appointments.”
According to Morrissey, 30 percent of patients skip appointments because they can’t get to them, and it costs the health care industry $150 billion per year. And these are serious Greatest Generation seniors, not baby boomers who are coming up next. The next 20 years will be a different story. Why? Because 70 percent of baby boomers live in the suburbs.
“With the population aging, we absolutely see a lot of growth in need,” said Jennifer Hartt, director of investments in health and digital health for Ben Franklin Technology Partners and an early investor in RoundTrip.
My first reaction was “well, duh…”. But baby boomers are dreaming if they think that services like RoundTrip can fill the needs of 70 million aging boomers.
Asking the wrong questions
What goes wrong first when you get old. (Photo: JCHS)
Baby boomers are looking around their houses and thinking “What can I do so that I can age in place?” and investing in renovations, when all the data show that one of the first things go to is the ability to drive — long before the ability to walk. Instead, they should be asking “What can I do to get out of this place? How will I get to the doctor or the grocery?” Every single one of them has to look in the mirror right now and ask themselves, “What do I do when I can’t drive?”
My mother-in-law’s house with that rusting Saturn in the driveway. (Photo: Google Maps)
I’ve written before about my late mother-in-law’s experience, about how it won’t be pretty when the boomers lose their cars. I keep going back to it because it was so horrible. In the last few years of my mother-in-law’s life, my wife Kelly spent two hours to take her mother to the doctor or the grocery. Joyce was lucky; Kelly didn’t work and could spend her day taking care of her mom. Not many people can do this. My own mom lived in an apartment in midtown and was within an easy walk (or wheelchair-push in her later years) to her doctor. She also had access to “wheel-trans” or special buses that transport people with disabilities; each ride costs the city $30.79. What happens when 70 million baby boomers start demanding transportation like that?
The problem is that we designed our suburbs and our newer cities around the car, so if you can’t drive, you[re trapped. As Sara Joy Proppe wrote in Strong Towns,
By designing our cities for cars, and consequently neglecting our sidewalks, we have siloed our elders in several ways. Not only does an inability to drive confine many seniors to their homes, but corresponding busy roads and inhumane streetscapes add to the isolating effect by also limiting walkability.
We have time to fix this
In 10 or 15 years, tens of millions of baby boomers will be in that position. That’s actually enough time to fix a lot of this. Walkable cities and towns have a way of turning into NORCs, or Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities. There are enough older people around to provide support services relatively efficiently. There are things for people to do; after my dad died, my mom took up bridge and played for years; she hated cards, but knew she needed to keep doing things, and there were people in the building she could befriend through bridge, so she played cards.
This is why we have to stop thinking of this as a transportation problem; it’s not. It is also why people have to end this fantasy of aging in place in the suburbs, trapped in their own little worlds. Instead they should think about moving to where they can actually get out of their homes and do stuff — meet people, shop or go to the doctor.
If urban planners and the politicians they work for had any sense, they would stop approving any more suburban sprawl and do a big intervention to allow mid-rise apartment construction everywhere in city centers where there is transit and pedestrian infrastructure that lets people get to their doctors and grocers without needing a car. Or they would adopt the principles of New Urbanism and make every new community walkable.
Google’s cute little self-driving car of the future is no longer a thing; they have moved on. (Photo: Google)
Instead, they either ignore this problem or pronounce, “Self-driving cars, autonomous vehicles will save us!” (In fact, we have said that right here on MNN.)
They won’t; they don’t exist, and the problems with them may be insurmountable. Ultimately, we have to face the fact that this an urban design problem, that our suburbs don’t work for an aging population. Ultimately, we have to build communities for people, not cars, as we have in the past. Most critically, we have to face the inevitability of demographics: Today it’s a problem, but in 10 or 15 years, it’s a disaster.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Associated Press
After weeks of speculation, the billionaire philanthropist and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg officially announced he was jumping into the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential-primary field.
Bloomberg is capitalizing on his estimated $52 billion net worth to run a highly unusual campaign, planning to entirely self-fund his campaign and not raise any money through grassroots donations.
On Saturday, Bloomberg also announced he was placing an enormous ad buy, spending a record-breaking $31 million on TV ads in 25 media markets over the course of just one week.
While Bloomberg’s unusual campaign gives him virtually no chance of winning the nomination, he can pay for TV ads at much lower rates as a presidential candidate than he could through a PAC, for example.
If Bloomberg’s top priority in the 2020 cycle is to help beat Trump, using his position as a candidate to air as many TV ads as possible for the best price could achieve a lot toward that end.
After weeks of speculation, the billionaire philanthropist and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg officially announced he was jumping into the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential-primary field.
Compared with the rest of the field, Bloomberg is capitalizing on his wealth to run a highly unusual campaign. He’s planning to entirely self-fund his campaign and not raise any money through grassroots donations, meaning he won’t be able to qualify for any of the Democratic primary debates.
Even more unusually, Bloomberg isn’t filing to appear on the ballot at all in the first four key primary states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina — and he’s focusing entirely on winning delegate-rich Super Tuesday states, including Texas and California.
This strategy gives Bloomberg virtually no chance of winning the nomination. He would be not only forfeiting the ability to earn any delegates at all during the first four contests, but he also would be giving up the chance to prove to Super Tuesday voters that he is a viable candidate who can actually win elections.
Bloomberg and his advisers are arguing that defeating President Donald Trump should be Democrats’ first priority going into 2020, and they’re not confident the Democratic field is best-poised to do it.
But Bloomberg’s unique strategy might shed light on what his campaign is actually trying to achieve. As opposed to running a campaign based on the traditional methods of retail politics and heavily campaigning in those crucial early states to win the nomination, Bloomberg is using the most important tool at his disposal to shape the race: money.
It’s all about the ads
Bloomberg made an eye-popping debut into the 2020 fray by immediately announcing that he would spend $31 million on television ads for himself to air between November 25 and December 3 in 25 media markets in key primary and swing states, including Florida, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, CNBC reported.
According to Advertising Analytics, the $31 million purchase breaks a record for the most money spent by a presidential campaign on television ads in a week, a distinction previously held by former President Barack Obama, who spent $24.8 million in one week at the end of his 2012 reelection campaign.
For comparison, the amount of money Bloomberg is spending on TV ads in just one week is almost as much as the $33 million Sen. Bernie Sanders reported having in cash on hand in his third-quarter campaign-finance filing — far more cash than any other Democratic candidates reported.
And despite being the eighth-wealthiest person in the US, Bloomberg — who built a business empire on data analysis — presumably wants to shape the 2020 race in the most cost-effective way possible.
Bloomberg. Reuters
It actually makes more sense for Bloomberg to buy ads as a candidate instead of through a political action committee
On the surface, it might seem like it would make sense for Bloomberg to just start a PAC to buy ads instead of going through the trouble of running for president.
But for a billionaire who plans to spend exorbitant amounts of money shaping the 2020 race, filing to run as a candidate and pay for ads through a campaign instead of simply starting a political action committee carries some significant financial advantages.
The Sunlight Foundation said in 2016 that the price of airing TV ads varied significantly by media market, but it’s almost always cheaper to buy ads as a political candidate than it is for PACs and super PACs — which can spend unlimited sums of money on electioneering.
Federal Communication Commission regulations require TV stations and networks to offer a price referred to as the “lowest unit rate” possible to presidential candidates based on the timing of their ad spot and how likely it is to be “pre-empted” or bumped by a higher-paying advertiser during “political protection” periods, which take place 45 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, according to the veteran TV sales rep Mike Fuhram.
But none of those considerations apply to PACs’ and super PACs’ ad purchases, meaning stations can charge virtually as much as they want to PACs and aren’t required to offer them the lowest price possible in the weeks leading up to an election.
For someone, like Bloomberg, who plans to purchase a lot of anti-Trump ads, this means he could save a lot of money by buying ads as a presidential candidate instead of through a PAC.
In the 2016 campaign cycle, for example, the Sunlight Foundation found that while Hillary Clinton’s campaign was charged just $1,500 per ad to air three spots in the 10:00 p.m. hour on the CBS affiliated station KCCI in Des Moines, Iowa, KCCI charged Right to Rise, the super PAC affiliated with the Republican candidate Jeb Bush, double that amount, at $3,000 per ad, to also air ads during the 10:00 p.m. hour.
If Bloomberg’s top priority in the 2020 cycle is to help beat Trump, using his position as a candidate to air as many TV ads as possible for the best price could achieve a lot toward that end.
Despite the rise and increasing relevance of digital advertising, the Sunlight Foundation said that “television, especially the local newscast, still reaches a particular audience that campaigns want: older Americans who will vote.”
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