The covid-19 pandemic was an omnicrisis
Date created: 2021-11-11
The COVID-19 pandemic was an omnicrisis because it highlighted and exploited many existing weaknesses in society.
To understand why the United States has fared so badly against COVID-19, despite its enormous wealth and biomedical savvy, one must understand not just matters of virology but also the nation’s history of racism and genocide, its carceral state, its nursing homes, its historical attitudes toward medicine and health, its national idiosyncrasies, the algorithms that govern social media, and the grossly deficient character of its 45th president.
The US focused heavily on medical treatments and vaccines, influenced by the dominating Germ theory of disease, the mistake being that they also overlooked social determinants of disease like malnutrition, poor sanitaition, dangerous working conditions.