Opinion: Pre-Holiday COVID-19 Surge Reflects Shocking Indifference to the Lives of Prisoners, Immigrants, the Elderly

Americans' holiday plans have proceeded this year against the backdrop of the worst surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths since the pandemic began. Yet the terrible news on the public health front has seemingly neither altered many people's plans to visit family nor lit a fire under Senate leadership to vote in further pandemic relief, such as the House approved over the summer.

The disconnect between the raging virus and this apparent "business-as-usual" attitude on the part of ordinary Americans and leadership has baffled many. We have been left wondering: why aren't people taking this more seriously? In the Republican-led states where the recent surge is moving fast, why aren't their elected representatives doing more to protect the lives of their constituents?

One potential explanation lies in the pattern of the virus' spread—and who it has affected the most.

Since the start of the most recent surge, public attention has centered on holiday travel and small-scale family gatherings as potential vectors of transmission. This focus is appropriate, at least in part, given the role community spread continues to play in transmitting the virus and the life-saving effectiveness of certain basic public health precautions that all people can adopt.

However, a lopsided focus on the actions of private individuals and families may make the virus seem primarily a matter of personal responsibility; in doing so, it risks obscuring the much larger role that cruel government policies and the chilling indifference and apathy of public authorities have played in making this virus so deadly.

Close analysis of virus transmission data—in states for which such information is available—reveals that individual travel decisions are far from the only culprit in spreading the disease. To the contrary, these data suggest that the worst outbreaks continue to cluster in nursing homes, prisons, and immigration detention centers: places, in short, where vulnerable members of the community have been isolated and packed away.

Businesses employing a largely immigrant and refugee workforce—such as meat-packing facilities—also continue to be sites of major outbreaks, alongside health-care facilities. As the New York Times recently reported: "in states where a breakdown is available, long-term care facilities, food processing plants, prisons, health care settings, and restaurants and bars are still the leading sources of spread[.]"

In seeking to explain why Americans have taken a surprisingly blasé atttitude to the recent virus surge, therefore, perhaps we need look no further than this. People free to travel across the country and visit loved ones are not in fact seeing the worst effects of the virus. These are instead facing people confined in prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, and other places where they have been marginalized.

Tragically, this may also answer the question of why the deaths of a quarter million and counting Americans has not shocked conservative lawmakers into action. Many of these deaths continue to be among people who cannot hold elected officials accountable at the polls, whether because they are undocumented, in prison, or subject to the voting restrictions that many conservative states continue to inflict on people who have been convicted of a felony.

By allowing the virus to rampage through the most vulnerable sectors of our society, the U.S. government has made a devil's bargain: trading the lives of the elderly, prisoners, immigrants, and other people forced to the margins against the economic growth and tax revenue that conservative politicians have cynically decided to prioritize.

The result is a society where the economic pie continues to grow for the wealthy, and many people continue to feel safe traveling, yet thousands of our neighbors perish every day from an out-of-control pandemic. This is the consequence of a policy that prizes growth for its own sake, rather than the quality of life by which growth is justified. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, a society that "provides bread to humankind, but lacks moral foundations, will callously exclude a good part of humankind from that which it delivers."

To restore moral foundations to our society's COVID-19 response, Congress should act now to provide sweeping pandemic relief of the kind the House authorized months ago, through the HEROES Act. (H.R. 6800). The executive branch, including the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, should also provide humanitarian release to people in their custody. Where release is not an option in keeping with public safety, officials should implement robust public health protections in these facilties. No one else should have to die because of the cruel policies of our government.

Traveling by air to see family this holiday season may be a poor choice, from a public health perspective. But above all it is the negligence and callousness of our public officials—not private citizens—that is killing our fellow Americans.

-- Joshua Leach, MDiv, Liberal Action co-founder. November 28, 2020.