It isn’t about our health…
The push to ‘reopen the economy isn’t about our health, it’s about capitalism.
(*Capitalism is white supremacist by nature — read and listen to Ibram X. Kendi.)
In response to COVID19 outbreaks many countries immediately shut down businesses in an effort to minimise the spread of the virus.
Throughout the shutdown our most essential workers across the world put their health and lives — and those of their families and children — on the line to keep basic infrastructure operating. Many of these workers are often operating without appropriate PPE, without hazard pay, and without basic healthcare coverage. Oftentimes they have little to no recourse for being forced to come to work because they cannot afford to *not* work.
Yet now they face even greater risk as governments rush to ‘reopen the economy.’
Meanwhile a second and parallel debate continues on the closing and reopening of schools. As governments and societies considered lockdowns, medical professionals and medical advisors in the policy sector felt, because of previous studies of influenza outbreaks, that schools might be particular hotspots. Also, while children were possibly less likely to spread the disease because of mild symptoms or being asymptomatic altogether, they contracted the disease at the same rates as adults. Therefore, recommendations to close schools were swiftly implemented.
A journal article in Lancet strove to understand the effectiveness of these policies during COVID19 outbreaks. They found that even though one individual study found school closure as an individual measure only ‘relatively’ effective, it was a ‘common-sense method of dramatically reducing spread of disease,’ part of an ‘overall package of quarantine and social distancing was effective in reducing the epidemic in mainland China’ and that ‘modelling studies from the COVID-19 pandemic support the use of national school closure as part of a package of social distancing measures’.
However, school closures came with trade-offs including, ‘a substantial loss of health-care staff to childcare duties’ that ‘might substantially reduce any benefit to health systems and populations brought by closures of schools’.
Childcare is central to economic reopening governments crave. While the Lancet article focuses solely on healthcare workers’ relationship to childcare, concerns about childcare have run rampant in all corners of the economic sector — from those working from home with kids to essential workers forced to violate shelter-in-place orders and social distancing recommendations in order to find childcare.
Schools reopening is the easiest answer to this problem. But is it worth the risk?
Reopening the economy is troubling for many. Polls show that the vast majority of people do not feel ready to return to ‘normal life’.
The move to reopen the economy and reopen schools has nothing to do with our health and everything to do with capitalism.
Instead of focusing on the economy, governments should focus on solving deeply entrenched, underlying issues that have been cracked wide open during COVID19. They should be building sustainable and equitable structures for our collective futures like universal basic income, nationalised healthcare systems, cancellation of debt, and movement away from success marked only by GDP growth (to name a few measures).
If they do not, we all will continue to live with the dysfunctional and harmful consequences of capitalist ideology that have become so painfully obvious. Those that are most burdened by inequalities in the system will continue to get left behind. (For example, In the US, while taxpayers fund a major part of vaccine development — these same taxpayers may not even be able to afford said vaccine.).
Capitalism does not work for so many of us and it was never designed to. We have a chance to live a more collective, humane existence. We should take that opportunity.
Read and Follow:
- Read and Listen to Ibram X. Kendi
- COVID-19: What has COVID-19 Taught Us about Neoliberalism? — WILPF
- DUTCH MANIFESTO — Five proposals for a better world after the pandemic
- 15 Children Are Hospitalized With Mysterious Illness Possibly Tied to COVID-19
- Haymarket Books — Teach In Series — How to beat COVID19 Capitalism.
Developmental Editing and Copyediting by Katie Simpson
