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I keep thinking of this quote from Frank Snowden, about the way epidemics exploit the underlying pathologies of the societies they infect:
Look at the prominence of aged care workers among the infected: https://twitter.com/BenjaminMillar/status/1281085016504537090?s=19
Or private security guards at Melbourne's quarantine facilities: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/how-hotel-quarantine-let-covid-19-out-of-the-bag-in-victoria-20200703-p558og.html
Or meatpacking plant workers in America: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/02/meat-plant-workers-us-coronavirus-war?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
China's food markets, for what it's worth, probably have a larger-than-usual share of migrant workers who can't work so easily in the formal economy because they lack the hukou registration.
What they all have in common is they're the exploited, bottom-of-the-heap gig-economy people outside the walled garden of steady staff jobs with protections and benefits.
That's the underlying comorbidity that Covid is exploiting.
That's the underlying comorbidity that Covid is exploiting.
AIDS exploited the homophobia and puritanism of the 1980s moral majority in America, and then the conspiracy theorizing of the 1990s as it exploded in South Africa.
Cholera seized on 19th century cities that had attracted vast numbers of rural migrants without building the sanitation and sewerage needed to keep them healthy.
Smallpox in 18th century Europe was likewise a disease mainly of desperate migrants from rural areas, where it was rare, to the cities, where it was endemic.
Smallpox was also the WMD with which colonialist societies both wittingly and unwittingly depopulated vast swathes of the New World to make way for ranching and large-scale farming.
So every disease tells you something about what's wrong with your society.
Optimistically, sometimes that leads to a cure. Our water and sewerage networks probably owe much to the push from the 19th century's terrible cholera epidemics.
Public health as a large-scale activity that treats all people, regardless of ability to pay, probably owes a debt to the spread of tuberculosis sanatoriums in the 19th and 20th centuries.
So hopefully we'll learn from this pandemic too, and seal up the cracks in our society where it festers. It probably won't be an overnight thing, though, and there's already been a terrible toll of deaths on the way. (ends)
