I suspect Covid-19 will likely reveal America’s true status as the world’s richest Third World nation as we’ll be completely unable to deal with the disease and its consequences. The reasons I assert this is that we have:

• A horrifically bad health care system that is about profit, not care. Many people simply will not visit a doctor no matter what because they know they cannot afford it.
• Work cultures and workplace tyranny that forces sick people to work, which will cause exponential transmission.
• Neglected agencies staffed by the fearful and the incompetent who will not be given the proper resources and haven’t had good leadership for years.
• Inability to impose adequate containment measures because concern with individual rights (metastasizing libertarianism) makes proper quarantine and isolation impossible.

It’s been quite a while since we have dealt with something of this nature and we are totally unprepared. While I make no predictions, I think if the virus gets out of hand it will reveal how fragile our systems are in a way that much of the rest of the developed world will not experience. We are no longer a developed nation, after all. We’ve coasted along on what was done during the 1930s-1970s and the downhill is now turning into a steep uphill. No more coasting, and Covid-19 might just be the huge boulder in the road.