It Took a Crisis: How a Pandemic Made Social Disruption Go Viral

By Jordan Johnson

From the bushfires in Australia to the outbreak of COVID-19 and America's greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, It Took a Crisis outlines how the events of 2020 underscored the need for a serious assessment of the status quo. These intersecting crises have laid bare existing instit

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Aug 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636767628

Jordan Johnson

Jordan Johnson is a gifted student. In 2018 he was a systemwide winner for the Young Georgia Authors writing competition. He currently serves as a peer leader for his middle school. He loves fishing, riding his bike, and his pets.

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It Took a Crisis

It Took a Crisis

How a Pandemic Made Social Disruption Go Viral

Jordan Johnson

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Jordan Johnson

All rights reserved.

It Took a Crisis

How a Pandemic Made Social Disruption Go Viral

ISBN

978-1-63676-760-4 Paperback

978-1-63676-761-1 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-762-8 Ebook

Contents

Introduction

Part 1.

The Crisis

Chapter 1.

Don’t Fall Off the Cliff

Chapter 2.

Virus Hunters

Chapter 3.

We Should Listen to Bill

Chapter 4.

The Pandemic Survival Guide

Part 2.

The Reckoning

Chapter 5.

Remember Their Names

Chapter 6.

Sustain the Momentum

Part 3.

The Possibilities

Chapter 7.

Sink the Ships

Chapter 8.

We Can’t Stop the Clock

Chapter 9.

Flip the Script

Part 4.

Conclusion

Chapter 10.

It Took a Crisis

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Introduction

It was 9:00 p.m. on a Monday in September when it hit me. I could feel it brewing in my chest.

To quell the anxiety, I needed to focus on something—anything. I replied to e-mails from work; then opened an Excel spreadsheet, determined to deal with the project I had put off for weeks.

My heart palpitated.

That’s it! That’s what’s making me anxious, I told myself. This feeling will go away, if I can just get this formula to work in my model.

COVID-19 had turned our apartment—like most homes across the country—into our workplace.

I bellied up to the kitchen table I called a desk, took a huge swig of Cab Sav, and focused my eyes and thoughts on the grid before me. An hour later I had balanced the numbers in my financial model. I also had tears streaming down my face.

Across the room my fiancé looked up from his laptop, noticed my emotional state, and rushed to my side.

Is everything okay? Is everyone in your family safe? Did something happen at work?

He posed the questions one might ask someone who has erupted into tears—to which I replied in blubbering and incoherent half sentences.

Everything is just so fucking bleak, I said.

The feeling in my chest that night wasn’t anxiety but weight. The weight of a global pandemic, of quarantine, and of confinement. The weight of the recession and of an election. The weight of climate change. The weight of intersectional oppression and of being a Black woman in corporate America. The weight of cell phone video making me an eyewitness to the murder of unarmed Black and Brown people—over and over again. The weight of calling my family to confirm it wasn’t us this time. The weight of thanking God it wasn’t us this time—not this time.

I couldn’t process the magnitude of these crises unraveling around me. I found strength in the realization that I was not alone in my paralyzing fear, and then I found purpose.

So began my author’s journey: my calling to bear the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic, document the disproportionate outcomes of this crisis, and share my perspective on where we go next.

Joe Biden got it right in his speech before the Democratic National Convention in August 2020. The man who would become the forty-sixth president of the United States described the four concurrent crises gripping the nation and, in many ways, the world:

The worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60s. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change. (Pramuk, 2019)

These outcomes are not isolated events. When deficient health care infrastructure and global isolationism fail to contain a contagion, the disease can spread across borders and leap over oceans. When a government fails to provide individuals and small businesses with adequate safety nets, the fiscal impact of a pandemic can spiral into an economic crisis. Injustice thrives when those in power uphold oppressive institutions, policies, and systems. Where skeptics deny the existence of man-made climate change its perilous impact cannot be slowed or reversed.

No single systemic failure arose because of a crisis. Instead, each crisis magnified and exposed cracks that were already there. Like parts in an assembly line, one crisis informs the next. When we acknowledge the interdependencies among these issues, we can design meaningful solutions to correct systemic inequity.

Take the United States’ public health response to COVID-19 for example.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Foundation defines public health as the science of protecting and improving the health of people and their communities, accomplished by promoting healthy lifestyles, researching disease and injury prevention, and detecting, preventing and responding to infectious diseases.

Seems pretty critical, right? You would think. However, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ public record on health care expenditures, the United States spends just 3 percent of the nation’s $3.8 trillion health care budget on public health activities. By contrast, 73 percent of the budget is reserved for health care insurance, including Medicare, private health insurance, Medicaid, and other federally funded insurance programs.

Due to the rapid advances in medicine that took place in the twentieth century—from eradicating polio and smallpox to the development of antibiotics—[by] the end of the twentieth century, public-health improvements meant that Americans were living an average of thirty years longer than they were at the start of it. (Yong, 2020) This is exactly what public health is meant to do. However, these improved health outcomes were not rewarded with continued funding, and they became a target for budget cuts instead. Essentially our government took an If it’s not broke, don’t fix it stance on public health investment.

With this mind-set, the federal government began pulling funding for public health. Between the late 1960s and the 2010s the federal share of total health expenditure for public health dropped from 45 percent to 15 percent. As a result, states were required to cover the gap in funding mostly on their own. (Haseltine, 2020) Naturally this resulted in regional disparities, as not all states are equipped with the resources to address this gap.

To make matters worse, between 2003 and 2019 the CDC cut funding for state and local public health emergency preparedness and response by a third. (McKillop et al, 2019) Without this funding these institutions did not have the resources required to manage public health under normal circumstances, let alone a global pandemic.

One estimate—as researched by Nason Maani, public health expert, and Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University School of Public Health—suggests that United States’ public health departments are currently $4.5 billion short in funding to provide a minimum standard of foundational public health capabilities. The wording here is extremely important. We are $4.5 billion short of providing the minimum standard in this country.

More shocking is the fact that the United States spends nearly twice as much as the average OECD country on health care. (Tikkanen et al, 2020) The OECD, or Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, was founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade and has ­thirty-eight Member countries to date.

Despite this high spending compared to peers, however, the United States has some of the worst health outcomes, as summarized by Roosa Tikkanen and Melinda Abrams in their brief U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2019: Higher Spending, Worse Outcomes? Compared to the average OECD country, we have the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rates. Adults have the highest chronic disease burden. We have the highest rate of obesity. We visit the doctor less frequently and have fewer physicians.

And this is before these numbers are even segmented by race.

How could this be? Our per capita health spending is the highest in the world, but this spending does not translate to improved health outcomes. A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that higher overall health care spending in the U.S. was due mainly to higher prices—including higher drug prices, higher salaries for doctors and nurses, higher hospital administration costs, and higher prices for many medical services.

Our pre-COVID-19 health care infrastructure could barely manage the day-to-day demands of our ongoing crises—including obesity, opioid addiction, and contaminated water systems.

Funding for community prevention, public health emergency preparedness, and chronic disease prevention programs declined, while the number of emergencies increased. In fact, in 2017 alone there were eighteen declared public health emergencies […] compared to twenty-nine combined declared emergencies for the prior ten years. (McKillop et al, 2019)

This trend indicates that as the threat of crisis grew our health care infrastructure shrank, hindering our ability to adequately prepare and respond when things went south. It took a global pandemic to get government officials to pay attention to these pleas for prevention.

The COVID-19 outbreak catalyzed a perfect storm for our fractured, underfunded public health system:

• Underinvestment in emergency preparedness and response infrastructure left us vulnerable to a pandemic. And negligent national leadership hindered acute attempts to contain the virus.

• Failure to address systemic risk factors contributing to high rates of chronic diseases resulted in a collision of chronic disease, systemic inequality, and a viral outbreak—magnifying the burden of the pandemic for vulnerable populations.

• Hasty roll out of stay-at-home advisories did not account for individuals whose jobs could not be performed remotely. The resulting spike in unemployment left millions of families without health care or a safety net.

• Essential workers—who are more likely to be Black, make a household income of less than $40,000, and not hold a college degree—are forced to work on the front lines of the crisis. (Kearney et al, 2020)

Twelve months after researchers in Washington state confirmed the first case of the novel coronavirus on our shores COVID-19 had killed more than 350,000 Americans. (Harcourt et al, 2020)

This tragedy