This is an especially torqued kind of screwing, because it didn’t have to be this way. It doesn't happen in societies with well-built social and medical safety nets. “If you have fewer assets, lower income, less wealth, less housing, are a person of color, you are less likely to be able to work from home,” says Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. “So there was a gap, a disparity in risk of acquiring Covid. That is a reflection of greater exposure.”
Those same people are also more likely to have the chronic conditions that the Global Burden of Disease singles out—because of poverty, lack of universal health care, lack of access to higher-quality food, and a public health system defunded, by some calculations, to the tune of $4.5 billion before Covid-19 was even a twinkle in a bat’s eye. “Your risk of dying if you have no underlying comorbidity is less than 0.1 percent,” Galea says. “People with lower socioeconomic position and people of color had more risk. In some respects, it’s that simple.”