PALESA MORUDU: Covid-19 lays bare US inequality and dysfunction as deaths rocket
The coronavirus crisis is exposing the quality of health care, standard of governance and social capital
The cursed pathogen. Nearly a third of the global population is under stay-at-home orders. The public spaces of our great cities are eerily silent. Major airports resemble mausoleums. Road traffic has plummeted. Restaurants are shut. It seems as if the world has been turned on its head and the economic crisis has only just begun. What will be the post-corona normal?
The novelist George Saunders wrote in an e-mail to his students at Syracuse University: “So much suffering and anxiety everywhere … This has never happened before here (at least not since 1918). We are (and especially you are) the generation that is going to have to help us make sense of this and recover afterward … But I guess what I’m trying to say is that the world is like a sleeping tiger and we tend to live our lives there on its back … And now and then that tiger wakes up. And that is terrifying. Sometimes it wakes up and someone we love dies. Or someone breaks our heart. Or there’s a pandemic.”..
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