The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us many hard lessons. One is that flow – not just of money but of all sorts of things – is fundamental to a functioning society. On both the material and non-material level, life is enabled by circulation, by constant movement. One could even say that relentless movement is one of modernity’s main characteristics. Charlie Chaplin, frantically trying to keep up with his tasks on the factory assembly line in Modern Times is emblematic not just of work (the kind of work which few in high-income countries experience anymore) but of many people’s daily lives.The coronavirus has now jammed up the gears in that machine.
When COVID-19 arrived, my work-life routine, like that of billions of others, was upended. I cancelled my flight to Dakar just hours before take-off, and instead spent the next week getting up at 5 am for marathon meeting sessions with my Senegalese counterparts. My first virtual business trip. A long-planned Italy vacation – scratched and postponed indefinitely. Dinners with friends, meetings with colleagues, leisurely morning café outings: delete, delete, delete. Maybe the only thing that didn’t change was my newspaper landing on my front steps every morning. The presses didn’t stop rolling. Yes, a throwback to earlier days and a relief for eyes which spend the rest of the days staring at a computer.
The effect of the pandemic has been to block or slow the many streams that comprise daily life. The virus, like humans, thrives on flow and exchange. Perhaps few of us paid much heed before to the pulsing undercurrent of money, goods, public transport, people, knowledge, and much more, until these things began to suddenly back up with the onset of the crisis and government responses. So, fairly soon (although not soon enough), starting in the city at the epicenter, Wuhan, China, governments began to curtail movement of anything that would aid its spread.
Money turned into molasses as commercial activity ground to a halt, shut down for the safety of workers as well as shrinking as consumption suddenly dropped off. Spending on the non-essential stuff, plummeted. Remittances, the money migrants send to their home countries, shrank by about 20 percent compared with 2019, with ripple effects in the home economies. And with their fall, a huge number of people who relied on them are expected to slip back into poverty.
Many supply chains were disrupted, or seized up, as industries halted production to keep workers safe. Other supply chains couldn’t cope with spiking demand. Toilet paper is now back on the shelves, but just try buying a bicycle these days, or a dog! There’s a long wait-list. A bicycle store in Florida first saw a boom in sales when the crisis hit as many people saw biking as an ideal pastime. A few months later it had to shut down when it was unable to source more bicycles, as manufacturers couldn’t keep up with demand. We now know that cycling is, well, counter-cyclical, in pandemic times, at least. But stop and think for a moment – when else have you heard that because demand for an item was so high, the store that specialized in those items went out of business?
A corollary to the rise in cycling was the fall in motorized vehicle traffic, to the extent that the skies cleared in many cities, and wildlife made a tentative steps into urban areas, to check out what had happened in the years since their habitat had been paved and built over.
The flow of knowledge imparted to growing minds has been curtailed with the closing of schools and universities. Online learning, if a child even has access, acts as a poor substitute and some wonder whether there will be a lost generation as an estimated 90 percent of school age children have been affected. Of course, this assumes that all those children were getting a decent education in the first place, an assumption that doesn’t always hold. In some countries, teachers don’t show up, and textbooks are outdated if they even are available. (I’m not offering this as a solution, but can mention in passing that I went to a Waldorf school, where we didn’t have any textbooks at all until high school. We had to write and illustrate our own “main lesson” books.)
In many cities around the world, the streets emptied as the flow of pedestrians petered out under lockdown measures. The seasonal tide of tourists virtually disappeared as international travel was sharply curtailed. In May 2020 international tourist numbers were down a whopping 98% compared with the previous year. Given that before the pandemic, the new buzzword was flygskam, Swedish for flight shame (stemming from the carbon emissions produced by flying) that would seem to be a silver lining.
The importance of a constant and steady flow will be familiar to most homeowners. In my experience, the vast majority of house repair problems stem from either too much or too little flow. Almost all the headaches we’ve had to deal with in our house over the past 10 years have been linked to electric current, gas, water, sewage and air (conditioning) not working, i.e. not moving through the system as they should. The normal circulation of the elements stopped or was rather in excess, when it came to water and, er, sewage. The optimal is an even, well-managed flow.
The COVID-induced economy and societal blockages are logical, if, at least in most cases disastrous for many people. COVID spreads through interactions and contact and the less of this there is, the safer we all are and the sooner the virus is beaten.
If we consider the factors that that inhibit the circulation processes vital to society and economy, both positive and negative examples come to mind. Among the negative: a heavy-handed bureaucracy which, for example, hobbles government service provision; trade barriers which reduce optimal allocation of capital, and increase the cost of goods; regulations which limit commercial activity. Unrelated to the pandemic, the US mail delivery service is another example of systemic flow that has been impeded. (Many suspect an ulterior motive behind the introduction of cost-cutting measures so close to the November US elections, when the use of mail-in ballots will be widespread.)
People in poor countries, however, don’t need a virus to slow life down and make it more difficult. Barriers to flow are par for the course. Inadequate or dilapidated infrastructure that blocks things from moving smoothly – roads, railways, electricity lines, water supply systems, and so on. Sluggish bureaucracies that dam up public service provision. Supply chains with key nodes missing.
In a way, with the onset of the pandemic and its accompanying precautionary polices, populations in developed countries, especially the poor and marginalized in these countries, have been experiencing a taste of low-income country lifestyle. That is, how inconvenient and difficult life can be when movement is inhibited. (A key difference, generally speaking, is that in low-income countries the poor form a much larger part of the population than in high-income countries.) Asian and African countries, meanwhile, are coping quite well, occupying the bottom half of the country list of fatality cases per population. Senegal is doing much better than the US.
It is hard to see how Western nations will come out of this crisis better than before. Combined with the massive recessions sweeping the world, we may be witnessing a convergence, of sorts, between the Global North and, Latin America excepted, the Global South.
Not only is the coronavirus assaulting our bodies, killing thousands, which is bad enough. It is also attacking our social and economic structures.
Scientists have found that once it enters the body, COVID-19 is capable of attacking almost any organ, with devastating consequences. It is doing something very similar to our economic systems.
Your money or your life
During the spring and summer of 2020, in the depths of the coronavirus crisis, human contact has become potentially life-threatening. Going to church, concerts, restaurants, ball games, just hanging out with friends…all the things that bring us together became potentially lethal, and were ordered to shut down. The slow pace of reopening and the hesitant return to normal life in many places highlights the ongoing fears people have of becoming infected.
The coronavirus has led to many needless deaths, in the sense that researchers have estimated locking down earlier could have saved tens of thousands of lives, notably in the US, UK, Brazil, Russia and other countries. In many countries, either by going into lockdown too late, or opening up too early, the health of the economy seems to have been given precedence over the health of the population.
Is there an inherent de-prioritizing of human life in some societies? If we consider just the US, the answer would seem to be yes. Add up the opioid deaths (67,000 in 2018) fatal shootings (over 15,000 in 2018), civilians killed by police (about 1,000 per year) not to mention falling life expectancy (a phenomenon unique among developed countries), one cannot but wonder whey so little has been done to address these types of deaths.
The disregard toward human life was not new, but has come into sharp relief during the crisis, which has so far claimed over 115,00 American lives (out of at least 420,000 worldwide).
Calculating risks
Of course, it is true that a balance must be struck between staying safe and living life. To quote Jean-Paul Sartre “to know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”
There is a risk calculus to everything we do. We’re always making trade-offs. Shut economies down too tightly and for too long and the side-effects can start turning lethal. Clearly, the health of the economy indirectly affects our personal health as well. People avoid going to the hospital, women in abusive relationships are further endangered, the poor run out of food.
However, in some countries, as the crisis dragged on it became clear that leaders, keeping an eye on the election cycle and the stock market, have been cavalier about the human costs. The default justifications for doing too little were either professed beliefs that COVID-19 is not that serious, perhaps even a hoax? Or that people’s freedom should not be curtailed.
What does the coronavirus threat mean for society? Specifically, what does it mean for the capitalist system, to which most of the world’s countries adhere to one degree or another? One could argue that, amid the economic havoc it has caused, and the many needless deaths, the virus also presents us with an opportunity. An opportunity to shift our focus away from materialism, consumerism, profits and share prices, and place greater value on human aspects.
I will argue that this would not be wide-eyed, new age attitude, but a smart investment in one of the under-appreciated pillars of capitalism – human capital. And it is precisely human capital that the coronavirus is attacking.
Capitalism’s foundations
According to economic theory, capitalism is based on three factors: capital, labor and land. The first two, capital and labor, have been severely damaged by coronavirus.
With labor, the impact is obvious. Millions have lost their jobs and a large share of those jobs will never come back. Many businesses have shut their doors forever, others are having to adjust to diminished sales as customer numbers fall. Still more are rebalancing how they combine labor and technology and accelerating the move to automation.
What about capital? In economic terms capital is an asset, a good. Traditionally, capital is considered the physical and financial material necessary for producing goods and creating wealth. Capital is the raw material to be transformed into things we use and things we consume. This process of capital extraction and transformation produces new value.
In simple terms, labor and technology are the skills, energy and tools used to create surplus value from that capital. We take a basically inert substance, matter, and process it into something useful and more valuable than before.
Mix in property rights and freedom of exchange, and in very broad terms you have the basic building blocks of a capitalist system.
Human capital
In the 1950s the concept of capital was expanded beyond the physical and financial to what was called human capital. This refers to the health, education, and social networks of a population. This capital is not visible, per se, but it is a very valuable asset. Simply put, being educated, healthy and connected with others helps all of us to live better lives.
Human capital also increases productivity, it makes the labor input more efficient and effective. Without human capital, physical and financial capital are not very useful, although technology is able to substitute for human capital for certain tasks, as production processes become automated.
Another type of capital is social capital. This is formed out of the contacts which individuals have with others, their networks. These can also be extremely valuable. The Kyrgyz have a saying (which was used for the title of a World Bank study on the importance of social networks in that country): better a hundred friends than a hundred rubles.
COVID’s attack on capital
It is precisely the three core elements of human capital — health, education, and social networks — which COVID-19 has so successfully attacked.
In terms of health, it has infected over 6 million people, and killed over 400,000 as of early June 2020. On the education front, the virus has hobbled our schools, weakened the ability of children and university students to learn. And when it comes to networks — the confinement, social isolation, and closure of restaurants, bars and churches has severely restricted our human contact. And for the roughly 50% of the global population that is without internet access or smartphones, it has degraded their social interactions. Not everyone spends their days in Zoom meetings or happy hours.
Of course, even before the crisis, it seems our society gave greater weight to financial capital than to the health or education of our population. One could argue that police killings of unarmed African Americans, and the apparent disregard among police for human rights that have become apparent during the protests are yet another indicator that in America the interests of society take second place to other interests. (On could say that “black” human capital is valued less than “white” human capital.)
After the 2008 financial crisis, government bailed out the banks, not ordinary people. The numbers that we track are financial — the Dow Jones, GDP, interest rates.
Why don’t we take as much care of our human capital as we do of our financial capital? Somehow, we’ve let ourselves, as a society, become focused on efficiencies, cost savings, share prices and shareholder value. It has come to seem normal to many people.
Just referring to the US healthcare system and the health of the population as an example — are people truly free if they face the threat of catastrophic health bills should they become sick? Is it good for capitalism when labor is hobbled in this way?
Undervaluing human health and education
Human capital is intangible. Is it because economists have trouble measuring it, that we undervalue it? (For example, it is fairly easy to track years of schooling, it is more difficult to measure the quality of education, i.e. how much children are actually learning.) Is it because financial and business interests largely control our political processes? A combination of the above?
Why, for example, does health insurance have to be linked to be employment, as is the case in the US? Why do we in the US, have a system where millions still don’t have health insurance when all other rich countries do? A lot of people are afraid to leave their jobs because they depend on them for health insurance. That can hardly be called freedom of movement, an essential element of a free market system which the US prides itself on having. It is not optimal for the free market. Staying in a job you’d rather leave doesn’t stimulate risk-taking and innovation, two prized elements of the free market system.
It is not that we can’t afford it — the US spends more money on healthcare per capita than any country in the world. It just does not spend it very well. Life expectancy is lower than all other rich nations and, as noted above, has been falling for four years (it finally ticked up again in 2019).
Opposition to guaranteeing health cannot stem from some love for unfettered free markets, or an aversion to government support. Medicare is huge and popular! And we are happy to bail out financial institutions, businesses, car companies, when they were on the brink of collapse in 2009. We always seem happy to lavish support on the private sector in the form of tax cuts and tax breaks.
Now, it’s true that trillions of dollars in stimulus funding have been passed on to citizens. But this is a reaction to the crisis. Why should we not take better care of human capital during the good times as well?
An opportunity to change?
Let’s hope that the assault on human capital by COVID-19 will lead to a shift in values. A shift away from fixating on financial capital toward human capital.
What I would hope arises from this is a different way of thinking, a more human-centric attitude toward capitalism.
Under such a human-centric capital system, as much weight would be given to human capital as it is to physical and financial capital. This may seem an obvious choice to many liberals. However, the shift will only take place if the die-hard free market, pro-business factions come to recognize it as well: that human capital — a healthy, educated population — is valuable, should be cared for and protected. Just like a company’s bottom line. That would be a kind of victory, and a metric worth tracking.
Historically, plagues have been considered a manifestation of god’s wrath, and as punishment for our sins. But what if coronavirus is, in fact, a god himself?
The coronavirus is invisible, powerful, ubiquitous, mysterious. This new god has reached every corner of our lives, touching almost every one of the 7.8 billion people living on the planet.
Like an intruder in the dark, the virus sneaks up on us with stealth-like precision. Yet, Coronavirus-God works its dark magic in broad daylight. Even as we engage in mundane, innocent tasks, interacting with our fellow humans, some of us are stricken down.
Coronavirus-God has humbled nations into submission. The best (and worst) laid plans of political leaders have been consigned to the shredder. Our old way of life has been suddenly, even violently, altered. We are weak and vulnerable in its face.
This god is mysterious. We know many things about it, but we don’t know a lot. Scientists are not able to determine exactly how, and why, it is transmitted. That is, what are the probabilities of getting infected through different types of proximity, different types of contact by going outside, with or without a mask? Of passing someone without a mask on the street? Of picking up my mail? Of eating food bought at the grocery store or delivered? Of being exposed to it just one time vs. ten times?
My wife has a cousin who lives with her husband and daughter in Rimini, Italy. The cousin fell ill, and was diagnosed with Covid-19. Her husband and daughter did not get it, or at least did not show any symptoms. (The cousin recovered.)
Another case: a distant in-law of my wife, in Germany, is a healthcare worker who contracted the virus. She had to quarantine herself and recovered. Her husband was tested, and found he was negative, even though he was obviously exposed before she knew she had been infected. They had been living and eating and sleeping together. How much more exposed to the virus can one be? Gods works in mysterious ways.
Gods, such as the Old Testament God Yahweh, have a track record (faithfully recorded in that tome) of cruelty and destruction. Pick any number of Old Testament stories. During the Flood, God destroys all of humanity, saving only Noah and his family, and as many species that could join them on their big wooden ship.
Indeed, many religions have gods of destruction, gods of plague, wreaking havoc on sinners and innocent alike. Perhpas coronavirus is a goddess in pathogen form? In many cultures, there are plague gods and gods of death. Kali, Hindu goddess of death and destruction, comes to mind.
In the past, natural disasters and plagues were attributed to God. The Black Death, the bubonic plague that devasted Europe and Asia in the 14th century, was seen by many as God’s punishment. Most people know better now, but among the faithful, the question of whether the coronavirus is an act of God is not clear cut.
Regardless, in the fight to develop anti-viral medication and a vaccine, this “god of death” is, for now at least, winning.
Coronavirus-God is targeting, among others, the people we rely on most, people who are doing good. From doctors and nurses and healthcare workers, and extending on down to workers in essential services who maintain order, provide us with care and food. It is targeting the elderly, people living their normal lives one day, suddenly taken from us the next.
Thus far, the new god does not have its own religion or its own worshippers. But it is asking us to sacrifice what we hold dear.
Will we prove up to the task and vanquish this new god of death? What good, or what evil will it reveal in us when its shadow passes?
Disasters like this help me understand what drives people into the arms of religion.
I am glad we humans were driven from Eden, that our eyes were opened, that we were able to learn about the world, and make it safer and better for ourselves, rather than being entirely at god’s mercy.
Pray to your god. Be comforted. But for me, the most important defenses we have are science, the rules we live by, and our common humanity.
The defense, the battle, really requires that massive amounts of assistance and resources be deployed to fight the virus. Many countries struggle to take care of their citizens in normal times. The coronavirus god has hit them like a hurricane hitting a rubber raft.
Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors without Borders) — a highly respected international humanitarian NGO, to which I have been donating — is supporting health authorities in providing care for patients with COVID-19, keeping essential medical services running, among performing other critical work. The IMF itself is providing $1 trillion in lending support to help countries maintain liquidity. The World Bank is sending $160 billion in financing to 100 countries over the next 15 months to help them protect their poor and vulnerable strengthen their health sectors and economies, among other things.
The Bible says you cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon. And yet money is exactly what is needed. Not wealth to be worshipped, but money to help those who are struggling. Money for the vulnerable who are struggling to feed themselves. Money to buy the protective equipment healthcare workers need. Money to prevent the collapse of economies.
Of course, among most households, money is much now harder to come by than it was just a few months ago, before the new god descended upon us. Millions of jobs have been lost. Millions of shops and restaurants are closed, the future looks uncertain. This all leads people to save rather than spend.
So, who is left to fight this Coronavirus-God?
In Genesis 32:22–32, Jacob, grandson of Abraham, wrestles all night with a man, who turns out to be either God or an angel, depending on different interpretations. The struggle left Jacob limping, but also with a new name, Israel. He came to be considered the traditional ancestor of the people of Israel.
Here is a modern parallel: Let Jacob, founder of a nation, be the state, our government. And the world’s governments are being tested as never before. They are locked in an intense struggle with this Coronavirus-God.
Many governments (and the societies over which they preside) will come out of this period wounded and limping. But it also represents a chance to start anew. A chance to reflect on how we want to live in the new era that will dawn when this is all over.
That’s a question on many people’s minds these days. A lot of us are following the numbers closely and wondering, how safe am I?
To truly understand risks, you must account for the time period for which those risks are valid.
According to recent forecasts by the University of Washington’s predictive model the U.S. may lose up to 68,000 people to Covid-19 before the pandemic is over. That number looks low, since as of April 24, 2020, the US has already recorded more than 50,000 deaths, and well over 2,000 per day are added to the toll.
If this forecast is accurate, the risk of dying would be 1 in 4,853. Not great, but not alarming, either. At first glance. Those odds are lower than from dying in a pedestrian accident, which are 1 in 541.
What’s wrong with this picture? Why are extreme lockdown measures being taken at the national, state, and local levels to deal with Covid-19, but not to mitigate many other, often preventable causes of death?
Even if the U.S. were to lose 2.2 million people, based on an alarming early forecast (which did not take into account containment measures), the risk to any one individual would still be “just” 1 in 166. That is far lower than dying of heart disease (1 in 6), and still lower than the risk of dying in a car accident (1 in 106), or even, supposedly, just from falling (1 in 111). (These estimates come from the U.S.-based National Safety Council.) The fatality risk per person from base jumping (pictured above) is around 1 in 60 annually.
Here’s the rub: the seemingly low “risk of death” odds related to the coronavirus are misleading. Why? Because the they don’t account for the time span over which they play out.
Time is a key factor when computing odds of anything happening. You see, you may die in an accident over the next 40 years. But you may die of Covid-19 in the next 40 days.
That, in a nutshell, is why our response to dealing with Covid-19 is so urgent and extreme when compared to our response to dealing with heart disease, car crashes, and other fatalities.
The virus has exposed the fragility of our society
Covid-19 has revealed how fragile both our societies and economies are. This is true both at the local and the global level. It is a story of how a microscopic pathogen has wreaked global havoc. With a diameter of just 60-140 nanometers (laid end-to-end, about 600,000 would make an inch), Covid-19 is nature’s nano-weapon against humanity.
The odds of succumbing may appear fairly low, but Covid-19 is scary because it is an imminent threat. In this post I’m going to explain why.
The invisible weapon against humanity
Let’s review. The coronavirus is adept at homing in on the most vulnerable among us, to disable and even kill. However, there is no guarantee that those who appear fit and healthy have dodged a bullet, as they can succumb as well. But unlike being hit by a “normal” weapon, in many cases people will never even know they have been “attacked.” In other cases, it will only become apparent days later.
Worst of all, the virus has weaponized humans against each other. We, the most social of creatures, can’t come physically close to one another because we might accidentally cause each other to die.
And so, almost every government in the world has told its citizens to keep a distance of least six feet from each other. Entire countries are under stay-at-home orders of varying strictness. Businesses have been shut, economies are under massive strain and headed for collapse. It is as though the Great Depression is being resurrected like a zombie from the dead.
The odds of not making it
As bad as things are, in a way, things could be much, much worse. Only a small share of each country’s population shows symptoms of being infected, i.e. are reported as Covid-19 cases.
There is general agreement that these case numbers—tracked by Johns Hopkins and avidly followed by perhaps millions of people—are significantly under-counting the actual cases. The actual number of persons infected is not yet known, given the still unacceptably low testing rates in most countries. Even so, even if the rates of dying doubles, the chance of any single person succumbing would remain very low.
A study from the Stanford Prevention Research Center estimated the absolute risk of dying among individuals younger than 65 without underlying diseases at just 1.7 per million in Germany (a country that so far has managed to keep death rates relatively low) to 79 per million in New York, the U.S. epicenter of the virus. That comes to a relatively minuscule risk of 1 person out of 588,000 in Germany, and a still very low risk of one person out of 12,658 in New York state.
These odds depend on age, gender and underlying health conditions, among other factors. Men, for example, are more at risk than women. And the risks are much greater for older adults than for the young.
In the U.S., the pandemic is taking a critical toll on African-American and Hispanic communities. This is due to the lethal combination of having worse underlying health conditions, and that they are generally less likely to have health insurance.
Let’s take demographics out of the equation for now, though, and consider the entire U.S. population of about 330 million people. That includes infected and non-infected, of course. And let’s remember that we don’t know the actual rate of infection, because not everyone is tested.
If U.S. fatalities from Covid-19 reach 68,000 before this is over, the absolute death rate for all ages would come to about one in 5,500. Looked at another way, if those are the odds of the average American dying of Covid-19, it means that 5,499 out of every 5,500 will survive this.
I am not minimizing the importance of the measures taken to try and control the virus. In fact, the projection are fairly “low” largely because of all the social distancing measures being taken. This may be lost on the “liberate America” protesters
Healthcare and hospital systems are under strain in many areas. Clearly, they are not prepared to handle a surge in patients, just as morgues and cemeteries were not prepared to handle them. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers—the real heroes of this crisis—are putting their lives on the line while caring for patients. Often, they don’t have the equipment they need.
An outside observer might say, why all the fuss? Why the lockdowns if the risk of dying is so low, not much higher than a bad normal flu season?
Compare these numbers to the Black Death, which hit Europe in 1348. An astounding 30-60 percent of the population may have died. For those going through it, it must have been apocalyptic. Here’s a firsthand account from a chronicle kept by William de la Dene at the cathedral priory of Rochester 30 miles east of London, written in the year the plague arrived:
“A great mortality … destroyed more than a third of the men, women and children. As a result, there was such a shortage of servants, craftsmen, and workmen, and of agricultural workers and labourers, that a great many lords and people, although well-endowed with goods and possessions, were yet without service and attendance. Alas, this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial…”
We can count ourselves lucky that we’ve only got Covid-19. (But this does not mean we can afford complacency. The next virus to hit us could conceivably be much worse.)
Covid-19 and the other risks we face
To return to my initial argument, if you compare the odds of dying of Covid-19 with the odds of dying from other factors, it is essential to understand over what time period it plays out.
That is because there seem to be many other causes of death for which the odds of dying are much, much higher. They include cancer (1 in 7), suicide (1 in 86), car accident (1 in 106), or from a gun assault (1 in 298). Even the chances of dying from choking on food (1 in 2,618) or from being hit while bicycling (1 in 4,060) seem to be worse than dying from covid-19, at least if you’re under 65.
The U.S.-based National Safety Council provides a long list of those odds:
Lifetime odds of death for selected causes, United States, 2018
Cause of Death
Odds of Dying
Heart disease
1 in 6
Cancer
1 in 7
All preventable causes of death
1 in 25
Chronic lower respiratory disease
1 in 26
Suicide
1 in 86
Opioid overdose
1 in 98
Motor vehicle crash
1 in 106
Fall
1 in 111
Gun assault
1 in 298
Pedestrian accident
1 in 541
Motorcyclist
1 in 890
Drowning
1 in 1,121
Fire or smoke
1 in 1,399
Choking on food
1 in 2,618
Bicyclist
1 in 4,060
Sunstroke
1 in 7,770
Accidental gun discharge
1 in 9,077
Electrocution, radiation, extreme temperatures, and pressure
1 in 12,484
Sharp objects
1 in 29,483
Hot surfaces and substances
1 in 45,186
Hornet, wasp, and bee stings
1 in 53,989
Cataclysmic storm
1 in 54,699
Dog attack
1 in 118,776
Lightning
1 in 180,746
The odds above show the risk in 2018 of someone in the U.S. dying of these various causes, but not dying in the year 2018 of any of those causes. (If that were the case, 47 million Americans would have died of cancer in 2018, not the estimated 609,000.)
Knowing that your chance of one day dying of cancer are one in seven may be unpleasant, and dying in a pedestrian accident 1 in 541. But these risks do not reflect the chance of dying within the next few months, but over the rest of your lifetime, which will extend for many more decades.
The average age of the U.S. population is 38.2 years, and average life expectancy is 78.5, so the odds in the table above really cover, on average, 40 years of a person’s life span.
At 50 years old, I still have, actuarially speaking, about 34 years left to live, and 34 years during which I could die as a pedestrian crossing the street. I don’t like to think about it, but I can handle it. But I could die of covid-19 in the next month. For proper comparison, it means that the risk of me getting hit by a car in the next month is 408 times (12 months times 34 years) lower than the 1 in 541 odds. The odds are now about 1 in 220,000 of me dying as a pedestrian next month.
Now look again at the odds of dying of coronavirus, of 1 in 5,500 in the very near future. Things look quite different.
To take the most extreme form, the risk of any one of us dying eventually is, unfortunately, 100%. As the Game of Thrones saying reminds us, valar morghulis (“all men must die” in High Valyrian). At the other end of the extreme, the risk of any one of us dying in the next 24 hours is close to zero.
There you have it. This is why there is, to put it mildly, a rather significant time dimension to risks. And that is why Covid-19 is so brutal. It is not about the possibility of dying from it, one day, maybe in a few years, maybe far in the future. It is that you, your loved ones, your friends, your colleagues, may die of it tomorrow.
Be prudent, be safe, and treasure the life you have. Remember, the biggest risk in life is to die without having lived.
But let’s leave the last word to Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. As the inimitable Tyrion Lannister puts it, “Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”
It is the middle of April 2020. Restaurants around the world stand empty.
In the U.S. we are entering the second month of Covid-19 restrictions on movement, business and social activities. As with most of the world, virtually the entire country is under some form of ‘stay at home’ order or lockdown.
Turbulence and uncertainty
The coronavirus pandemic has created huge uncertainties, including: how the easily the virus is transmitted, why some are infected and others aren’t, why some but not others succumb, when the combined health-economic crisis will be over, how bad the damage to the economy will be, and when will it recover.
The fear and uncertainty have been tracked by the stock market, which has exhibited violent swings. March 2020 was the most turbulent month of the stock market in the 124-year history of the Dow Jones Industrials, as measured by daily falls and rises.
While virtually everyone has been affected by the crisis, it would be an overstatement to say that “we’re all in this together.” Amid all the uncertainty, one thing is certain: the poor and vulnerable are going to suffer the most.
Those of us who still have jobs — especially jobs that don’t require us to leave the home — are the lucky ones. We can still count on an income (for now, anyway.) As businesses shutter, jobs have become a scarcer commodity and almost overnight, millions have suddenly lost their main source of livelihood. Since the middle of March, 10 percent of Americans have lost their jobs.
Unprecedented use of the term “unprecedented”
On the economic front, the present pandemic has begun eliciting comparisons not with the global financial crisis of 2008, but with the decade-long Great Depression that afflicted the nation starting in 1929. Policy makers and citizens alike are hoping for a quick recovery.
In the meantime, a shocking number of people face a grim reality as they have been pushed to the unemployment front line. In the three weeks ending on April 9, 16 million people claimed unemployment benefits. The unemployment rate has spiked to an estimated 13 percent, the highest since the Great Depression.
A Pew Research Center survey taken at the end of March found that nearly nine of out 10 Americans said their lives had changed a little and 44% said their lives had changed in a major way as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
These, and many other, massive changes did not gradually set in; they occurred in a matter of weeks.
The people most affected, of course, are those who have succumbed to the virus, and those in hospitals. Then there are the millions of doctors, nurses, EMT workers and thers in the healthcare sector, working on the front lines and putting their lives at risk. These new heroes are the most highly exposed to the dangers of the pandemic.
Unpleasant choices
However, on a structural level, the blow has landed hardest on low-income workers (as usual) and informal workers. Millions of people have lost their jobs in sectors that are collapsing, such as hospitality, retail, travel, manufacturing, house cleaning, childcare, or in sectors which are considered essential businesses and services, where continuing to work means more chances of exposure.
In some of these sectors — groceries, warehouses, delivery services — demand has even surged, and hundreds of thousands of jobs are being created. This is hardly a cause for jubilation, however, because simply leaving your home to go to a workplace puts you at greater risk. The low-paid employees at nursing homes, and in social care, cleaning, etc. naturally are also rewarded with a higher chance of infection.
Those who are low-paid do not have the relative luxury of white-collar workers to stay at home and work remotely. If they quit their jobs, they lose a paycheck. If they stick with it, they may be putting their lives and those of their loved ones at risk. A grim choice, to say the least.
For those in sectors that have just cratered, their source of livelihood has evaporated and it is uncertain for how long, or whether, those jobs will come back. Predictions are that many restaurants and other businesses will close permanently, which does not bode well for the economic recovery after restrictions are lifted and life goes back to normal, or a “new normal,” whatever that will look like.
While the government is spending trillions of dollars to cushion the blow, people working in informal jobs, including undocumented migrants, will not qualify for government assistance. Even the $1,200 in government relief going to the rest is not nearly enough to make up for lost employment.
And so, millions are cast out to sea in a leaky vessel, heading toward the twin catastrophe of Scylla and Charybdis. These are the people who will struggle to survive using the safety nets or their own meagre (and often non-existent) savings to carry them through. They also have fewer resources— such as savings and other assets — to fall back on during hard times.
The global shock
Low-paid, poor households are considered “vulnerable” during normal times. Vulnerable to what? Well, to the catastrophic situation we are in now. This “shock,” a term used by economists to refer to a sudden disruption with negative consequences, is probably already pushing many vulnerable into destitution.
Normally, shocks hit people at an individual level, or because a sector has been hit. Individual shocks might come in the form of an illness or injury, or death of a family breadwinner, which dry up an income stream. Sector level shocks affect an entire industry, such as the shutting down of the coal industry in England under Thatcher’s reforms, or of the textile industry in Nigeria when the country began allowing cheaper imports from China. Shocks also occasionally hit an entire nation, such as Hurricane Maria which devastated Domenica and Puerto Rico in in 2017. But this time, the shock is global, all-encompassing and, yes, unprecedented.
For individual workers, compounding the risks that come with working outside the home are the risks of simply getting to work. Many low-paid workers rely on public or shared transportation. Obviously it is more difficult to practice social distancing in confined spaces, such as subways or buses.
Circumstances are tough enough for the vulnerable who are still healthy. But for those who become ill, the situation gets much worse. Getting sick while just getting by imposes a cost not only to people’s immediate physical health, but is a tax on livelihoods and the wellbeing of dependents.
In the U.S., as in many developing countries, there are three specific areas where the poor slip through holes in social safety nets: paid sick leave, health insurance, and unemployment benefits. Combined, these big holes in the net can, perversely, incentivize people to risk their own wellbeing —and now, in the age of Covid-19, their own lives and those of others.
Lack of paid sick leave
The lack of paid sick leave doesn’t just harm individuals, it threatens the public welfare. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), which highlighted this issue in November 2019 (well before the pandemic hit these shores), over 32 million workers in the U.S. have no paid sick days off, with low wage workers being the least likely to have sick leave. The combination of no of sick leave and low income incentivizes behaviors that run against measures needed to mitigate the risks thrown up by the pandemic. Covid-19 can thus “cost them their livelihoods, as well as their health”.
Without paid sick leave, workers cannot afford to take unpaid time off when they are sick. That means they will continue to work, while exposing others to their illness, with potentially deadly implications. In other words, individual choices, resulting from public policies, end up harming the public good, even as it widens inequality.
Lack of health insurance
In the U.S., many of those same workers who do not have paid sick leave also lack health insurance.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of uninsured Americans fell significantly —from 46.5 million to 27 million — between the time the Affordable Healthcare Act was passed in 2010, and 2016, Obama’s last year in office. Since then, the number of uninsured Americans has been creeping up again. From 2017 to 2018 it increased by 500,000, according to Tolbert et al (2019).
Unexpected healthcare costs threaten to burden already limited household finances. They disincentivize seeking treatment or preventive care. Though some governments provide free or reduced-cost services to its poorest, the coronavirus may now present an additional expense for those ineligible, or who cannot access it.
Lack of unemployment benefits
For the many who work in the informal sector, or as gig workers — think Uber and Lyft drivers — there are no unemployment benefits.
Although governments in some countries are making an effort to support those who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, if you don’t have a contract, you can’t be laid off, and you can’t claim benefits. You just watch your income shrink or disappear.
Safety nets under strain
Meanwhile, NBC News reports that nonprofit community centers, who primarily serve as safety nets for un- and underinsured American citizens and immigrants, are running out of funding as the coronavirus ramps up. Not surprisingly, the poorest are suffering the most, as this USA Today article points out. A drop in donations, volunteers, supplies, and certainty of funding, combined with overall lack of preparedness, is forcing these clinics to reduce their services.
Compounding poverty
Similar to the way in which investors reap compound interest, money begets more money in an upward spiral of wealth accumulation, so does poverty beget more poverty in a downward spiral asset depletion.
Thus, other poverty factors and demographics can compound the economic and health impact of the coronavirus on the poor. For example, the poor tend to live in smaller homes, more cramped environments (think of urban slums and shantytowns) and in larger families. This makes social distancing more difficult, and isolating the sick next to impossible.
Even if more vulnerable and elderly family members are staying home and practicing social distancing, someone who works, not by choice but by necessity — may bring the virus home with them.
Being poor is bad enough, but the coronavirus, and especially the government measures taken to combat and contain it – shutting down businesses, ordering people stay at home — hurt the poor much more than anyone else.
I’ve focused on the situation in the US above. With its weak support for the poor, the US, despite being a rich country, has quite a bit in common with developing countries. A big difference is that the US is home to the world’s global currency. It can print as many dollars as it needs to bail itself out (although a move not entirely devoid of fiscal consequences).
A far-off consolation?
Plagues and pandemics sometimes reorder societies. It may be a meager consolation, but sometimes the reordering benefits the lower classes, leveling the playing field. After the Black Death swept through Europe in the 14th century, killing between 30 and 60 percent of its population, demand for labor jumped, serfs were freed from their masters, and wages increased.
For those who have been alarmed by the relentless rise in inequality in rich countries, the pandemic may be a blessing in disguise, although for many of the poor living through this crisis now it will be too little too late.
