We've been operating under a massive, fundamental misunderstanding & the people who recognized it didn't correct us because it was to their benefit that we continue to misunderstand.

The economy isn't businesses, never has been.

The economy is people. https://twitter.com/CZEdwards/status/1278770776502493184?s=20

That we haven't been focused on people first and foremost in a global *health* crisis that is killing and disabling thousands is entirely backwards.

The economy cannot be reopened without people.
and those people need to be healthy, to be safe, and to be available.

Healthy was step one, which would've required that we work to limit transmission of the virus not just to "flatten the curve" so that hospitals weren't overwhelmed, but to limit the number of people who were sick, debilitated and dead. We bungled that from day one.

Then we have safe. We still can't achieve safe because we bungled healthy. We cannot expect everyone, especially not higher risk people, to return to in-person work scenarios when the virus is still doing a chorus line song and dance through society.

We bungled safety too. We didn't do enough to ensure it for our essential workers and we've seen the cost, in the meat processing industry, the triple-digit death toll (that we know of) for grocery workers and spikes of sickness that we don't talk about at UPS, Amazon, USPS, etc.

Failing, as we have, to learn our lesson with essential workers, it's folly to think that other people can come back to work -- in open plan offices? -- feeling any sense of safety or as if their employer cares about their wellbeing.

And we would be here for hours if I got into how devastatingly we failed at safety for residents of nursing homes and other congregate care facilities & for people incarcerated and in detention.

I'm just going to say this: more than 1/3 of San Quentin inmates are COVID positive.

Lastly, there's availability. People with children aren't going to be available to return to work if schools aren't open, and because we continue to fail at health and we don't know how to do anything other than fail at safety, we cannot reopen schools.

*If* we had been sensible, *if* we had understood that the economy is people, that everything grinds to a halt when people cannot work, we would have approached this entire pandemic very differently, from the top down.

Now, it appears to be too late.

Because state borders are porous and the need for food, medicine & essential supplies requires *some* people to travel, our response should have *started* with a national shutdown with stay at home orders issued for every single American who didn't provide food, medicine or care.

Would that have eliminated all virus transmission? No. Would we now see single states new daily case counts higher than the whole of Europe now? Probably.

But it's too late to try it now, because now we're in "well we started reopening and we're not reclosing now" mode.

But we didn't reopen the economy, we reopened businesses and left the economy behind.

And it's going to continue to cost us human lives.

I don't have any conclusion, just lament.

We could have done better. We owed to ourselves and our kids. Thousands of people have died & thousands more will because we don't -- or won't -- understand something as basic as "people's lives are more important than business profits."

It didn't have to be this way.

(If this thing gets to me, which given my health issues will almost surely mean my death, I've left instructions for that to be on my gravestone.)