Thread by @ASlavitt

COVID Update: 700,000 lives lost and a nation’s soul damaged to COVID. 1/

We are going through a period of extended trauma. We witnessed it all. Denial of science, a health system marked by neglect, massive disparities between rich & poor and black & white, cruelty & bullying, unmourned losses.

And then COVID happened. 2/

Our accumulated sins which have played out slowly and in shadows over many years got to be seen in high speed as the pandemic fished out suffering both cruel & levied at the many who had a harder time protecting themselves. 3/

If the country suspended its divisions for any time at all during the pandemic, it was only as long as the feeling of personal risk was shared. 4/

As death rates rose so did the stories showing death mostly taking its toll from the other— farm workers, nursing home occupants, inmates, paramedics, people with medical conditions. BIPOC communities, hourly workers & frontline responders were ripped apart. 5/

But loss was handed out in cruel doses. While some protested the great exaggeration, some families have lost 20-30 extended members.

What was measured by the 100 we soon measured nu the 1000 & now only 100,000.

Yet for those closest, real loss is still measured by the one. 6/

Many began to protest they knew no one who had died of COVID. An era of mocking disbelief & indifference assaulted families & medical workers.

Belief in what you can’t see requires a flexing a level of imagination. Sacrifice requires empathy we did not have in deep reserve. 7/

For nearly a year flag never flew at half staff. Hospital workers were never officially thanked or spoken of by our nation. Lonely deaths were not properly memorialized.

Portable morgues and crisis of care medical decisions didn’t move us to act. 8/

We appeared as a nation more inconvenienced than deeply struck. We had accepted school shootings, hostile weather, lack of health care & poverty and only knew that changing it required action we would not take.

COVID was just an extension of our practiced indifference. 9/

A virus requires spreaders to thrive. But as steps to save lives emerged— a cloth mask, refraining from large gatherings— they assaulted the fantastical notion of freedom many thought they deserved. 10/

Small inconveniences were rejected as government tyranny. 11/

Steps to preserve lives, far from the clear national priority, were instead considered highly suspicious— driven by an elitism which expected you to value the lives of those who many didn’t believe belonged in the country to begin with. 12/

Science (or what Mike Pence called magic) was the great hope— a solution which required no sacrifice.

When 2 decades of investment from Tony Fauci to develop the mRNA platform became promising, it was absconded by Trump & Pence as quickly as Fauci was blamed for everything. 13/

We became the country with the most & the least.

Vaccines everywhere as the world looked on in envy. Vaccines unused as hospitals filled.

Many lives saved turned into new lives lost. Regret, denial & lies found an audience that saw anti-COVID as more dangerous than COVID. 14/

With near 700,000 dead now, the nation so fixated on “what’s in it for me” must ask “what has happened to us.” 15/

The pandemic will end. Measures will be forgotten. Our record will live on. And our opportunity for a re-do won’t exist.

As we mourn who we lost, I’m afraid for what’s been lost. 16/

I’m sometimes asked how good our response will be to the next pandemic.

I think we will be exactly as prepared as we are concerned about the next loss of life. end/