We faced an epidemic stress test and failed.

Why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Photo by Kasper Rasmussen on Unsplash

As we pass the one-year anniversary of the end of the US Covid-19 public health emergency little has changed since before the pandemic arrived. The eviction moratoriums and extended unemployment benefits have expired. Over 20 million people have been disenrolled from Medicaid in the past year and the expansion of the Child Tax Credit, that cut childhood poverty in half, has been left to sunset. Most in the country have moved on with their lives paying little attention to any lessons that should have been learned from a pandemic that left over one-million people dead and 250,000 children without one or both parents. The families that paid these ultimate tolls are disproportionately from the lower echelons of socio-economic status. Economic inequality played as large a role as the virus in determining who lived and who died. Yet, we move on while paying little attention to our failure to provide financial security and robust healthcare broadly across our society. It is a time to be bold – not a time to continue with a pre-pandemic life as normal.

Stress tests are common in health and finance. An elderly patient walks upon a treadmill while monitored. If their heart and lungs can’t keep up, physicians look for an underlying cause and attempt to fix it. Financial regulators perform similar tests in banks and other financial institutions. How would a change in macroeconomic circumstances affect a bank’s ability to remain solvent?  If the bank fails to pass the test, regulators demand changes in asset and loan allocations in order to protect depositors and lenders. Stress tests are a means of protection that give a snapshot of what could happen and they make sure that we are prepared for unfortunate and unexpected events. If problems are encountered, we don’t move on without making changes. That would be a dereliction of duty for a physician or a regulator.

Since the spring of 2020 our society has faced its own stress test and failed miserably. In March 2020, Deborah Birx, President Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, stepped in front of a chart and predicted 100,000-200,000 deaths from the pandemic. At the time of the prediction, these dire numbers seemed astronomical. Few guessed that reality would hand us 5-10 times these totals. We took steps to protect ourselves both physically and financially. Yet, many of these actions were too late.

Those who lacked consistent high-quality healthcare, in part because of poor health insurance or no insurance at all, entered the pandemic with underlying conditions like diabetes or cardiovascular ailments that made hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19 more likely.  We couldn’t fix these medical vulnerabilities overnight. Many low-income Americans still live in similar conditions today because of a lack of access to high quality healthcare. We faced social vulnerabilities too. Far too many in our country sat on the precipice of financial ruin as we entered the Covid-19 pandemic. It took only a short term of lost wages before they were forced to rely on food pantries or confronted with other financial problems. I discuss many such people in my book, The Rich Flee and The Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks. Other hourly wage workers, who remained employed in essential front-facing occupations, faced uncaring employers who did little to protect them. Some firms even prohibited the use of protections, such as face masks, later in the pandemic.

What is our response to the results of this pandemic stress test today? Nearly nothing. Protections of workers and low-income renters have disappeared. Minimal attempts to require clean air in corporate and public buildings have resulted in no new legislation. Policies that we know to effectively reduce poverty in general and especially among children, like the expanded Child Tax Credit, are gone. The enrollment of new families onto Medicaid didn’t bankrupt the country and yet we seem fine with tossing millions of hard-working families and their children into a healthcare abyss as Medicaid disenrollment continues (nearly 22 million people to date). Even states like Mississippi, where a majority of the population wants Medicaid expansion, are denied it by a Governor who views Medicaid as unhelpful “welfare.”

Because of our underlying social inequality, we failed our pandemic stress test. And, it isn’t as though our social ills have disappeared. The arrival of the pandemic magnified our existing problems such as the falling life expectancy for blue-collar Americans that existed before 2020 and continue today. We see these fractures and chasms between those with privilege and those without all the more clearly after having gone through the stress test. Yet, we seem to be retreating from our problems sheepishly. Instead, we need to be bold and work to rectify our societal faults and failures. We need to provide more robust financial and housing security for people with low incomes. We need to disengage from the ridiculous policy that the quality of most people’s health insurance and healthcare coverage depends on the job that one holds. We need to give children hope by lifting them out of poverty. We need to provide high quality education to all children regardless of the financial circumstances of their parents. We need to move forward with hope and optimism and attack the problems we face and not continue with policies that ensure our country will continue with an underclass that is guaranteed to suffer.  

Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.