Notes on a Pandemic
“You got it all figured out
until you’re drowning in it.”
— “Underneath,” Code Orange
It occurred to me, in watching the first soundings of the crisis appear on my twitter feed through Bronze Age Pervert retweets, in the course of watching the Chinese government try to cover up what was happening and our own government play it down, and then watching the DNC hold primaries in three states last Tuesday in the midst of a pandemic only to seclude their newly anointed dotard in his Delaware hermit kingdom for the duration of the crisis, that I am, in ways previously hidden to me, naked before history. Forty years of stagnation had created a patina of normalcy that, no matter how claustrophobic and demoralizing it felt, shielded me from the radical contingency that makes up the warp and weft of historical time. I feel how I felt the last time I got rocked in a fight: I knew what had happened — someone had clocked me in the face — but the movement from fact to reality travels along the same track as the movement from time to experience. I was caught somewhere in transit.
This is not to say nothing has happened, or that my life has never been changed by political events outside my control — I don’t come from a class so cossetted — but that a feeling of suspended animation that once pervaded American life has entered caesura. Day by day, the neoliberal order of decentralization, offshoring, and hyper-financialization has been reduced to nothing but its weaknesses overnight. This might be the end of the end of history that I thought 2008, 2011, and then 2016 would be. But of course, financial meltdowns are baked in the system, spectacular revolts are more spectacle than revolt, and who could be surprised by a CEO reality gameshow host becoming president in a politically anemic and morally unserious society? It takes a material, global crisis to shortcircuit something like neoliberalism. And here we are.
The material crisis is both obvious and complicated. We simply don’t have enough masks. The national stockpile sits somewhere between 30 and 50 million depending on which government official you talk to. In a paper written in part by CDC officials 5 years ago, their best-case scenario of masks needed sits between 1.7 and 3.5 billion. Healthcare workers can get more mileage out of an N95 than the manufacturer recommendation use timeframe the paper employs (something around 2–4 hours), which softens the number needed but not by much. New York’s Gov. Cuomo has been very clear that the ventilator situation is equally dire. And California’s governor, Gavin Newsome, has just requested what amounts to the sum total of the national stockpile for California alone.
As far as testing goes, the America Clinical Lab Association (ACLA), has recently stated that it is, “alarmed by the latest Senate proposal — it fails to clearly designate essential emergency funding for expanded testing capacity and laboratory operations. If this legislation moves forward, it would set up commercial laboratories to perform COVID-19 testing at a loss, putting at risk the private sector efforts that the country is relying on for national testing. Free testing is an empty promise if labs do not have the resources to process specimens.” According to the Financial Times, America has now matched China on coronavirus case trajectory. We’re in dire need of testing, ventilators, and personal protective equipment and our system groans under the strain.
Our government seems incapable of handling the problem. Or, in watching Senators leave a COVID briefing, play down the threat, and then dump their stock, governors admit that the global market competition for supplies is ruthless, and Larry Summers, in a brutal self-own, reveal that he thinks having a great economy is the same as having gobs of money by tweeting, “Thoughts at the end of a long week: Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?”, our government seems capable only of mishandling the problem. Tearing away the curtain reveals a fundamental conflict in what good governance is and what we’ve been up to and who it has benefited for the last few decades.
That’s where the complicated part comes in. There’s a backstory to all this.
In 2009, when H1N1 rolled in, we used 85 million masks, but never built back the stockpile. Two major culprits have created this dilemma. First, government spending cuts have curtailed agencies’ ability to buy, stockpile, and maintain equipment. This poses a huge problem for things like ventilator storage — not only in the equipment expensive, but maintenance takes valuable and necessary man-hours.
Secondly, the lengthening and thinning of supply chains has winnowed the flow of medical supplies. As Super Buyers like CVS and WalMart have created monopsonies, they’ve forced suppliers to sell for less. This profit margin pressure pushes production overseas where labor goes for less and regulations remain scant. This creates problems for hospitals who need to stock up on all of these goods, but have to mind their budgets.
It’s also been dangerous for national security. As reported by Wired in 2018, “According to federal data, only 5 percent of the more than 230 million surgical masks and 30 percent of the more than 20 million respirators bought by American health care each year are made in the United States. The rest are made abroad, mostly in factories in Mexico and China. If a flu pandemic began and borders closed, there is no guarantee those masks would be delivered.” [emphasis mine]
It’s true that on Sunday’s Coronavirus Task Force Briefing, the White House clarified its numbers with regards to what it’s delivering and to where. But in the background, there’s Trump’s CDC budget slashing, the firing and/or departure of staff members who went through a vitally important test run scenario on a pandemic, and the Senate’s inability to pass a relief bill because it’s trying to accommodate all the special interests beyond the public welfare that they serve. As one lobbyist put it, “Any time there is a crisis and Washington is in the middle of it is an opportunity for guys like me.”
In terms of political stability and national security, the last few decades have proven a catastrophe. The reason our system cannot materially handle this crisis is that it was never meant to.
More later.
