- Interview by
- Nicole Ashkoff
For the better part of a year, the world has fought SARS-Co-2, a novel coronavirus, in which nearly a million people have died and millions have fallen ill. In the United States, especially on older members of the population, the virus has wiped out. Fifty-five million Americans and older live in about two million U.S. homes. Covid-19 accounted for more than 90 percent of deaths, while approximately 0.2 percent were people under the age of twenty-five.
Efforts to calm the virus have caused additional pain. By the end of August, the epidemic had left about nineteen million Americans out of work, and food and housing insecurity had risen sharply. But the pain from the lockdown is not evenly distributed.
The elite have valued the balloon of their stock portfolio, and many professionals are able to keep their jobs by doing housework. It is the home of the country’s poor and working class, especially with children, who have borne the disproportionate share of the burden. Low-income Americans were much more likely to lose their livelihoods or be unable to learn from a distance due to unsafe work, business and school closures.
Jacobin Editorial board member Nicole Ashkoff sat down with two public health experts to discuss the challenge of keeping Americans safe without forcing working people to bear the lion’s share of pain and danger.
Catherine Yeah is a biologist and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School where she specializes in infectious disease epidemiology, immunization and post-licensed vaccine safety surveillance. He is a founding member of the New World Agriculture and Ecology Group, a former and current member of Science for the People, and a longtime activist in the struggle against farm labor and imperialism.
Martin Culdorf is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Culddorf has developed methods for detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks used by public health departments around the world. Since April, he has been an active participant in the Covid-19 strategy discussions in the United States, his native Sweden, and elsewhere. This interview has been slightly modified for clarity.
