Looking at early Covid19 numbers here in US by geography, it is looking more & more like this is going to hit hardest lower income Americans, especially minorities. Both for total cases & for deaths

For a few awful reasons.

First is ability to shelter in place & quarantine.

Put simply there are those who have the luxury & resources to not work or work from home, or isolate themselves in well equipped homes. Others can't

Other people have to go out a lot

Think of it as the Laundromat gap.

Notable exceptions to this are Doctors & other Medical workers.

But otherwise, being able to be comfortably inside your home for 3 months isn't normal. Think of apartments with 1 bathroom & 9 people. Or Trailers.

There is a Pandemic hierarchy https://twitter.com/Chris_arnade/status/1243738987061272576?s=20

So the rich can far more easily hide away & follow all the official guidelines. For the poor that is going to be much much tougher.

Then there is the pre existing conditions. Being poor makes it far harder to be healthy. Makes it far harder to have proper health care, diet, etc

So not only will poor probably suffer higher rates of infection, it will be more fatal.

(For those who will say, well they shouldn't have smoked & eaten junk food. Ok. Go back in time & tell them the few cheap pleasures in their life are bad & they should take up bikram yoga)

The combination, of being unable to easily isolate, and being more at risk of death once exposed, is going to create a death gap. The poor will die more than the rich. That is awful enough at a moral level.

But it will also have political consequences longer term

Inequality is reality of American life. But it is rarely as starkly exposed as now

Upper classes are squirreled away in safe houses, while middle class, working class, & poor risk their lives to keep shit running

Like power grid, food chain, etc. (Doctors being the exception)

That won't be forgotten after this over. How will it change stuff?

My wild guess; Except for medical professionals, there is going to be an even greater distrust of the professional class

Whose high paying & high status jobs will been seen as the luxuries that they are

It is going to add fire to the already simmering educational divide in the US. Which is not cool!

Hopefully though, it also ends the conversation around high GDP vs low GDP regions. https://twitter.com/Chris_arnade/status/1243864937551859716?s=20

For those who need data

PS: This initially (outside of Asia) was a wealthy persons problem, spread by global travelers, but that is changing and will continue to change with time https://twitter.com/SethS_D/status/1245484285383061506?s=20