I spent the day playing Stardew Valley and attempting to recover from a terrible night's sleep. I embrace my own uselessness. Being unproductive feels like an act of protest these days, anyway.
I'm not going to get too far into the weeds on this, because I haven't done research. I might be completely wrong about things. I might be catastrophizing well beyond what the situation warrants. So take all of this with that caveat. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong or right, but don't @ me if you think I'm somehow spreading bad information. I'm a well of ignorance, and I know it.
But this has been driving me nuts for days, the more I hear about it. I'm not hearing anyone saying what I'm thinking. So maybe I'm completely off base. But goddamn:
I keep hearing about how antibody testing will be critical to an intelligent reopening process. (The fact that the process seems set to start without it is a whole separate issue here.) And maybe I'm just being a no-good, paranoid disabled fool, but all I see is a special new flavor of discrimination spiraling outward.
So anyone with the antibody can return to life as we knew it, presuming we've determined reinfection is not possible? Great. And what of those who have not yet had a survivable exposure to covid-19? Because in another country, another universe, this plan would be fine if you had a robust safety net. Hard, certainly, for some people to remain largely isolated at home to avoid exposure. But if there were provisions to make sure their basic needs were being met--food, housing, medicine--it might be the best option. A strange, divided world, but not insurmountable, I suppose.
But this is 21st century America, and we still don't believe in providing shit for anyone. Is there any evidence that our leadership will experience a broad-based change of morality and start enacting programs to support the newly created class of Inside People? Or will we, like we have at every goddamn turn, decide that people who are vulnerable must have done something to deserve their fate and tell them to fuck off rather than care for them? Will those stuck at home have to hope they have some social connections with the antibody who are willing and able to support them?
And what of those who are immunocompromised for whom the much-promised vaccine might not be an option? Will they simply be shut out of all life--more so than their existing health issues might already do that? It won't just be a matter of deciding what level of risk a person is willing to take on. It sounds like they won't be given the choice by whatever enforcement mechanisms are put in place.
I don't hold out a lot of hope that the current acceptance of remote work will continue. Disabled people have pointed out that the remote work accommodations they requested and were denied for years, on the grounds that the employers just couldn't possibly manage such a demand, were in fact ready to go at a moment's notice if it was that or lose revenue. If companies have the option to go back to how things were, if they have enough of a workforce among the antibody-approved population to function, what's to stop them from just abandoning any employee or potential employee who would only be able to work from home?
I mean, it doesn't help that one of the first mentions I heard of antibody testing also suggested the image of people obligated to wear badges indicating they had been cleared to move around in public. Which. Mm. Definitely nothing has ever gone wrong with putting badges on people to distinguish acceptable people from a second-class group of citizens with restricted rights.
This is to say nothing about the question of testing. We can't manage to get testing done as it is for treatment purposes. We're already seeing politically motivated distribution problems for testing. The antibody testing would potentially see more of the same. Will red states get plenty of testing support and materials, allowing larger proportions of their populations to return to work and economic activity? Will blue states ~magically~ experience shortages of the same, keeping them trapped in limbo?
The potential racial and class disparities are, frankly, beyond my capacity to address. On the one hand, screwing over minorities and marginalized communities is established US policy. On the other hand, those same communities are currently seeing a disproportionate exposure to covid-19, because they work in the kind of blue-collar, public sector, and service jobs that are ZOMG ESSENTIAL and aren't being permitted to stay home safely anyway. So I don't know how the antibody testing policy would further victimize those populations, but I'll be unsurprised if/when it does.
The only actual objection I've heard so far was the suggestion that it would create a kind of black market for infection. People would be desperate to be permitted to return to work and normal daily activity, so they would seek out voluntary exposure to the virus. Which I agree is very much a potential problem! Built into that problem, though, is the idea that people will not be able to survive if they aren't allowed free movement again--the driving desperation.
Which means people are, at least unconsciously, aware that the antibody-based reopening plan will create such social disparities. Why isn't that issue being addressed more directly? Because a lot of these problems would be at least lessened if we decided to provide safety nets. If we decided people's survival shouldn't depend on how economically useful they are, this plan might be just fine. For fuck's sake, when will we start planning for that?
