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The next death wave from COVID-19 will be the poor, rural, and white
https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-next-death-wave-from-covid-19-will-be-the-poor-rural-and-white/
What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying.
At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people infected and/or killed by the coronavirus.
As the scale of the coronavirus pandemic dawned on Americans during the month of March, most of the media attention was given to white people like Tom Hanks, while the danger of coronavirus to black people went largely underreported by American media. It was around this time when both the media and the White House decreed it a national emergency.
The early cases that made the news and caught everybody’s attention were mainly wealthy white people who’d traveled to the West Coast from Asia and the East Coast from Europe.
Trump’s official national emergency declaration came on March 11, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
And then came April 7, 2020.
What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying.
At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people infected and/or killed by the coronavirus.
As the scale of the coronavirus pandemic dawned on Americans during the month of March, most of the media attention was given to white people like Tom Hanks, while the danger of coronavirus to black people went largely underreported by American media. It was around this time when both the media and the White House decreed it a national emergency.
The early cases that made the news and caught everybody’s attention were mainly wealthy white people who’d traveled to the West Coast from Asia and the East Coast from Europe.
Trump’s official national emergency declaration came on March 11, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
And then came April 7, 2020.
Cities have been stricter than rural areas. Blue states more than red. Even where a state's governor has chosen to open, city/county governments have put in stricter orders for social distance or masks. And then liberals take this much more seriously than conservatives because of course we do.
Like drug addiction and similar problems, America is not going to take it seriously on the national level until it hits rural areas hard. And small towns have fewer resources to deal with it.
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