Tag: economic justice

On money, nursing home care, and Covid-19.

In April, I wrote several essays and articles about our collective response to Covid-19.

I was worried – and am still worried, honestly – that we weren’t making the best choices.

It’s hard not to feel cynical about the reasons why we’ve failed. For instance, our president seems more concerned about minimizing the visibility of disaster than addressing the disaster itself. We didn’t respond until this virus had spread for months, and even now our response has become politicized.

Also, the best plans now would include a stratified response based on risk factor. Much more than seasonal influenza, the risk of serious complications from Covid-19 increases with age. Because we didn’t act until the virus was widespread, eighty-year-olds should be receiving very different recommendations from forty- and fifty-year-olds.

Our national response is being led by an eighty-year-old physician, though, and he might be biased against imposing exceptional burdens on members of his own generation (even when their lives are at stake) and may be less sensitive to the harms that his recommendations have caused younger people.

I’m aware that this sounds prejudiced against older folks. That’s not my intent.

I care about saving lives.

Indeed, throughout April, I was arguing that our limited Covid-19 PCR testing capacity shouldn’t be used at hospitals. These tests were providing useful epidemiological data, but in most cases the results weren’t relevant for treatment. The best therapies for Covid-19 are supportive care – anti-inflammatories, inhalers, rest – delivered as early as possible, before a patient has begun to struggle for breath and further damage their lungs. Medical doctors provided this same care whether a Covid-19 test came back positive or negative.

(Or, they should have. Many patients were simply sent home and told to come back if they felt short of breath. Because they didn’t receive treatment early enough, some of these patients then died.)

Instead, our limited testing capacity should have been used at nursing homes. We should have been testing everyone before they went through the doors of a nursing home, because people in nursing homes are the most vulnerable to this virus.

I realize that it’s an imposition to make people get tested before going in, either for care or to work – even with real-time reverse-transcription PCR, you have to wait about two hours to see the results. But the inconvenience seems worthwhile, because it would save lives.

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From March 25 until May 10 – at the same time that I was arguing that our limited Covid-19 tests be used at nursing homes instead of hospitals – the state of New York had a policy stating that nursing homes were prohibited from testing people for Covid-19.

I really dislike the phrase “asymptomatic transmission” – it’s both confusing and inaccurate, because viral shedding is itself a symptom – but we knew early on that Covid-19 could be spread by people who felt fine. That’s why we should have been using PCR tests before letting people into nursing homes.

But in New York, nursing homes were “prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

This policy caused huge numbers of deaths.

Not only do nursing homes have the highest concentration of vulnerable people, they also have far fewer resources than hospitals with which to keep people safe. Nursing home budgets are smaller. Hallways are narrower. Air circulation is worse. The workers lack protective gear and training in sterile procedure. Nursing home workers are horrendously underpaid.

The low wages of nursing home workers aren’t just unethical, they’re dangerous. A recent study found that higher pay for nursing home workers led to significantly better health outcomes for residents.

This study’s result as described in the New York Times – “if every county increased its minimum wage by 10 percent, there could be 15,000 fewer deaths in nursing homes each year” – is obviously false. But even though the math doesn’t work out, raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do.

If we raised the minimum wage, we probably would have a few years in which fewer people died in nursing homes. But then we’d see just as many deaths.

Humans can’t live forever. With our current quality of care, maybe nursing home residents die at an average age of 85. If we raise the minimum wage, we’ll get better care, and then nursing home residents might die at an average age of 87. After two years, we’d reach a new equilibrium and the death rate would be unchanged from before.

But the raw number here – how many people die each year – isn’t our biggest concern. We want people to be happy, and an increase in the minimum wage would improve lives: both nursing home residents and workers. Which I’m sure that study’s lead author, economist Kristina Ruffini, also believes. The only problem is that things like “happiness” or “quality of life” are hard to quantify.

Especially when you’re dealing with an opposition party that argues that collective action can never improve the world, you have to focus on quantifiable data. Happiness is squishy. A death is unassailable.

Indeed, that’s partly why we’ve gotten our response to Covid-19 wrong. Some things are harder to measure than others. It’s easy to track the number of deaths caused by Covid-19. (Or at least, it should be – our president is still understating the numbers.)

It’s much harder to track the lives lost to fear, to domestic violence, and to despair (no link for this one – suddenly Fox News cares about “deaths of despair,” only because they dislike the shutdown even more than they dislike poor people).  It’s hard to put a number on the value of 60 million young people’s education.

But we can’t discount the parts of our lives that are hard to measure – often, they’re the most important.

On sacrifice.

On sacrifice.

Worldwide, people are making huge sacrifices to quell the Covid-19 outbreak.  The burden of these sacrifices falls disproportionately on young people.

Across the United States, universities have closed for the year.  My governor has announced that all elementary and high schools will be closed at least until May 1st.  Bars, restaurants, and malls have been forced to shut down – their employees have been laid off.

Graduating during a recession greatly reduces people’s lifelong earnings.  Young people who have the bad luck of entering the workforce in the next few years will suffer the consequences of this shutdown for their entire lives.

Childhood development has an urgency unmatched by other stages of life.  When children don’t learn to socialize at the appropriate age, they will always struggle to catch up with their peers.  Across the country, huge numbers of children were first learning to read in kindergarten and the early grades.  Now they’re watching television. (My kids, too.) With schools closed until May, and summer break coming soon after, they might be watching TV for months.  They’ll have to work harder to match other people’s educational achievements, for their entire lives.

Many students depend on school meals to stave off hunger.  Kids on free & reduced-price lunch often dread holiday weekends – now, not only have their educations been yanked away, but they’re also suffering through worse food insecurity. Schools and communities are scrambling to provide resources. 

Everyone is being asked to stay at home, to keep at least six feet away from other people. 

The cost of social isolation is lower if you’re established in a white-collar or professional career.  Many office workers can work from home.  The people who were cleaning those offices, or selling coffee and bagels to people on their way to work, get laid off.

The cost of social isolation is lower if you have enough money to stock up on supplies.  The cost of social isolation is much lower if you’re retired.

Everyone is being asked to make sacrifices, but young people are sacrificing more.

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This pandemic wouldn’t be as bad if people could be tested for the virus. We could quarantine the sick and staunch the spread.  But U.S. citizens don’t have access to a test.

Why not?

In their article for the New York Times, Matt Apuzzo and Selam Gebrekidan write that:

As the virus reached into the United States in late January, President Trump and his administration spent weeks downplaying the potential for an outbreak.  The Centers for Disease Control [a government agency gutted by our current president] opted to develop its own test rather than rely on private laboratories or the World Health Organization.

The outbreak quickly outpaced Mr. Trump’s predictions, and the C.D.C.’s test kits turned out to be flawed, leaving the United States far behind other parts of the world – both technically and politically.

Indeed, the Republican party consistently argued against preparing for the virus, downplaying its significance, even as Republican senators used information from confidential briefings for illegal insider trading, selling most stocks and buying shares of companies that make teleconferencing software.

This risk of pandemic was exacerbated by voters who put the Republican party in power.

This is a problem that was created by older Americans.  By age, these were the results of the 2016 presidential election. 

Image from Wikipedia.

Anyone who is currently younger than 22 – the people who are being made to sacrifice most during this crisis – was not allowed to vote in the 2016 election.

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I was too young to understand the 1980s HIV crisis, but I imagine that it was at least as scary as the Covid-19 pandemic for the people at risk. 

That virus was inevitably fatal.  The deaths were agonizing.  Rampant homophobia and cultural stigmatization – even in the medical community – meant there were few places to seek help. 

The only way to keep safe was to make sacrifices.  Fooling around is fun, but it seemed like it might kill you.  To stay alive, you’d have to tamp down your desire.

But if you made that sacrifice, you’d be safe.  The people making sacrifices were the people who’d benefit.

What about now, during the Covid-19 pandemic?

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My whole family probably contracted Covid-19.  There’s no way to know for sure, because at that time the U.S. didn’t even have tests for people experiencing the acute phase of the illness, and there’s still no antibody test to check whether someone was exposed to the virus in the past. 

I fell sick on February 10th.  I had a pretty bad case, it seems. I had to take high doses of naproxen, but the week-long fever still left me dizzy at times.  The only way I could breathe well enough to sleep soundly was by taking puffs of my spouse’s albuterol inhaler.  My joints ached so much that it hurt whenever I went running even three weeks later.

My children were sick on February 11th and February 13th.  Each napped for half the morning and then felt better.  They’d spiked a high fever, but these lasted less than a day.

In China, 87% of the people who got sick enough to be tested for Covid-19 were at least 30 years old. 

Only 2% of the people who got sick enough to be tested were 20 years old or younger.

And the risk of death is even more skewed.

Image from Wikipedia.

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Young people are being forced to make tremendous sacrifices.  They will suffer the consequences of this disruption to their education for their entire lives.  But they aren’t the people who benefit. 

Young people have very little risk from Covid-19.  It’s no fun to be sick, but when my children contracted what I assume to be Covid-19, it was no worse than any of dozens of other coughs or colds they come down with each year. 

Most teenagers – whose lives are being up-ended by school closings – could contract Covid-19 and be totally fine.

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My spouse asked, “What would you do about it?  Not months ago, but if you were handed this crisis today?”

My answer was the same as always.  We should enact a wealth tax – preferably a global wealth tax to undermine the tax havens – and use it to fund a guaranteed basic income. 

Using a global wealth tax to fund a guaranteed basic income would help address the persistent inequities caused by historical injustice – it would be a sensible form of reparations.  It would provide a buffer against the economic insecurity caused by automation and the gig economy.  It would transfer money away from the people who drew salaries during the years when we really ravaged our environment, and give it to the people who must now settle for a lower standard of living due to climate change.

Right now, there’s another rationale.  Young people are making huge sacrifices during this pandemic; older people receive the benefit.  A wealth tax used to fund guaranteed basic income would provide some recompense for the sacrifices of young people.

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My family is practicing “social isolation,” although it hasn’t been mandated yet.  My children are willingly making sacrifices for the benefit of others, insofar as a four- and six-year-old understand what’s happening.  And yet I’ve seen little acknowledgement in the news of the enormous, selfless sacrifice that children are making – that young people across the country are being forced to make.

They will endure the consequences of this sacrifice for their entire lives.  This sacrifice almost exclusively benefits others.  And yet there’s been no talk of recompense.  No gesture of gratitude from the people who benefit toward the people who are paying the costs.

Which, unfortunately, is how our country has often worked.