Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism – Rosa Luxemburg
Bruegel the Elders’ Triumph of Death (1562) depicts the victory of death over life, as death riding a red horse and wielding his scythe leads a skeleton hoard against what remains of the living. In the painting the dead rise again to help further death in his inevitable triumph. On a hillside to the top right a skeleton prepares to behead a man, while in the foreground one slits the throat of another victim as a dog feasts on a dead or dying woman nearby. All of the social institutions of the day are featured in the painting, none are immune, “neither power nor devotion can save them.”[1] It is as if the living are slowly being transformed into the dead; a plague cart is driven by skeletons, what appears to be the church and the army are now populated by the living dead. There is a crushing sense of inevitability to the scene; despite piety, political power, wealth, or otherwise, all will eventually succumb.
The painting is representative of the late-medieval artistic genre of the Danse Macabre, which served as an aesthetic means of meditation on the universality of death.[2] The genre emerged in response to the horrors of the middle ages: its violence, famine, and most notably its pestilence. The Black Death or Bubonic plague was, in many ways, the central event of the Mediaeval period. A pandemic so large that it wiped out half of Europe’s population at the time. The Black Death killed over 200 million people throughout Europe and Asia, a loss of life so vast that it “is more than the number of deaths caused by World War II, World War I, the Mongol conquests, the Napoleonic Wars, the Vietnam War, the American Civil War, the 2003 Iraq War, and the War of 1812 combined.”[3] The social, economic, and historical impacts of the Black Death in Europe were significant in scale and varied in nature, bringing about a period of “dramatic structural change.”[4] From effectively ending serfdom and seeing increased social and geographic mobility for peasants (many who would become urban labourers), to a surge in religious persecution and violence against Jews, Lepers, Romani and foreigners, who were often blamed for the pestilence.[5] It took as long as two hundred years for Europe’s population to reach the same level as before the plague.
The scale of the Black Death, its death toll, and its impacts on the course of European history, make it a par excellence example of what has come to be known as an existential risk. The concept of the existential risk was formulated by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who defined the concept as follows:
An existential risk is one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development.[6]
While Bostrom’s work focuses primarily on the risks posed by technology, such as general artificial intelligence and the necessary ethical guidelines required to mitigate said risks, the emergent field of existential risk studies has come to consider a wide range of different threats to society and humanity at large. Crises such as the currently unfolding COVID-19 pandemic are one such risk.
In the terms of existential risk studies the COVID-19 pandemic technically is not a true existential risk per se, as despite its severity it does not fundamentally threaten humanity’s ongoing existence or civilisation as such, but rather what the field refers to as a ‘global catastrophic risk.’[7] Nevertheless, the conceptual apparatus of existential risk studies provides a useful framework for understanding the current pandemic, both in terms of its public health and socio-economic impacts, and the relative failure of the international community to be prepared for such an event — let alone prevent it from unfolding in the first place. In this essay, I will draw on the conceptual apparatus provided by existential risk studies alongside Angela Mitropoulos’ notions of ‘the allocation of risk’ to discuss the pandemic, with a particular focus on how liberal-capitalist governments in the West have, in their negligence and largely reactive responses, allocated the distribution of the risks posed by the crisis unequally.[8] While death, as Bruegel reminds us, is inevitable regardless of power, wealth and privilege, death at the hands of the virus is not. As is already evident, the impacts of the unfolding pandemic will be unequally distributed relative to liberal-capitalism’s asymmetries of political and economic power — a toll that the working class, precariously employed and unemployed, the homeless, the displaced, and the racially marginalised will be made to bear.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Our Lack of Preparedness
As an unknown virus emerged in China’s Hubei province in November of 2019, the world at large was not watching, at least not at first. China’s government suppressed information regarding the epidemic initially, as it scrambled in its attempt to control the emerging crisis. The United States Centre of Disease Control’s (CDC) special unit that was focused on researching emergent viruses and potential pandemic threats in China had been defunded months prior.[9] The CDC had already reduced their global efforts to prevent the emergence of pandemics by as much as 80%, due to funding cuts from the federal government, closing various programs around the globe in 2018 and 2019.[10] Taiwan, which is not a member of The World Health Organisation (WHO) due to its geo-political relationship with China and China’s relative power and influence globally, attempted to get the word out alerting WHO in late December regarding the virus and its capability of human-to-human transmission. According to the Taiwanese government WHO failed to communicate this information to other countries.[11] Once the virus and emerging epidemic became part of global public discourse, cases had exploded in Hubei provenance, which was quickly under lockdown. China then implemented social distancing and shuttered economic activity over much of the country, as it began to establish systems of testing, contact tracing, and localised quarantine outside of Hubei, while both a health and humanitarian crisis unfolded in Hubei itself.
WHO began to encourage other countries to establish the necessary testing, contact tracing, and quarantine systems, methods that are generally considered to be epidemiological best practice,[12] while emphasising the ultimately limited value of travel bans and lockdowns—‘the cordon sanitaire.’[13] WHO then sent a team into China to conduct further research to try and develop greater knowledge of the specific nature of the largely unknown pathogen. The virus began to spread around the world. Soon Italy, Iran, and South Korea, would surge in case numbers. What has happened since is now common knowledge, retold again and again via the global news media. At the time of writing, Europe is largely under lockdown with large death tolls in Italy and Spain, while the United States is becoming the new epicentre of the pandemic with case numbers exploding. COVID-19 is already a truly global pandemic (the first in a hundred years), and an unfolding global catastrophe of a scale that we have not seen since WWII.
After, in many cases, initially down playing the severity of the virus our respective governments have all now taken varied measures against its spread, many are unprecedented and draconian in nature, from travel bans, border closures, and lockdowns, to war time measures to reorient production to produce surgical masks and ventilators. All are reactive (and in some sense reactionary), necessary due to a basic lack of preparedness for what was in effect a statistical inevitability historically speaking. Proactive measures, such as establishing appropriate systems for testing, contract tracing, self isolation and quarantine of cases, alongside ‘physical interventions’ such as social distancing and public hygiene campaigns, have been implemented with mixed success. Taiwan, South Korea (after an initial error), and Hong Kong, all have been fairly effective in this regard — countries that had first hand experience with the SARS epidemic.[14] While countries like the United States seem to be abject failures, with incredibly low testing rates due to both their privatised healthcare system that charges the individual for being tested and the production of faulty test kits.
One may find oneself wondering why have our governments been so ill prepared? Why was there not more effective communication and global cooperation between WHO, our respective governments, and other institutions such as the CDC? Why did our governments not have more stringent pandemic management plans in place, or maintain adequate ‘surge capacity’ in our public health systems? As the risk analyst Nassim Taleb observes, preparedness for ‘black swan’ events (essentially events that are statistical outliers), such as a global pandemic is a rather thankless task.[15] If one is successful the event, of course, never occurs:
It is difficult to motivate people in the prevention of Black Swans […] Prevention is not easily perceived, measured, or rewarded; it is generally a silent and thankless activity. Just consider that a costly measure is taken to stave off such an event. One can easily compute the costs while the results are hard to determine. How can one tell its effectiveness, whether the measure was successful or if it just coincided with no particular accident? […] Job performance assessments in these matters are not just tricky, but may be biased in favor of the observed “acts of heroism.” History books do not account for heroic preventive measures.[16]
Here it should be noted that a pandemic such as COVID-19 was of course not a true black swan, but rather a ‘gray swan’ or “modelable extreme event,” which is to say that it was essentially forecastable given the relative historical regularity of pandemics.[17] It was not a matter of if, but rather when and where would such a virus emerge from. WHO, the CDC, and epidemiological and public health experts had long been warning the global community regarding the necessity of adequate preparedness for such an event. For example, Michael Greenberger the Director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security in the U.S. concluded his rather prophetic Better Prepare Than React: Reordering Public Health Priorities 100 Years After the Spanish Flu Epidemic published in late 2018 by stating that:
Even with the medical and scientific advances made since the Spanish flu, the public health emergency community’s approach to pandemics still follows a cycle of panic–neglect–panic–neglect, and through inadequate and slow development of countermeasures, we remain dangerously vulnerable to the threats these pandemics pose […] If we were to once again have a severe, nationwide epidemic such as the Spanish flu, our public health system would be ill prepared. […] the United States is not now as prepared as it needs to be for present day threats, and quarantine and isolation will likely not be sufficient to stop a true pandemic.[18]
In liberal-capitalist societies in the West, whose recent politics has been defined by the ideology of neoliberalism, with its austerity budgets and slashing of social services, it should be no surprise that such costly and thankless initiatives would not receive the necessary funding. Indeed, WHO the very international body whose task it is to coordinate international action on such global public health issues is grossly underfunded. As aforementioned, the CDC’s global initiatives into researching viruses in animal populations with pandemic potential had recently been defunded. Many Western countries have limited levels of pandemic preparedness in terms of planning and public health infrastructure (as the unfolding pandemic has made increasingly apparent). Health systems and hospitals are often massively over stretched already, systemically underfunded due to years of austerity budgets under neoliberal governments. As the writer, activist, and historian Mike Davis outlines in the U.S., “in-patient hospital beds declined by an extraordinary 39% between 1981 and 1999,” as measure enacted to maximise occupancy, reduce operating costs, and increase profitability.[19] A cost saving measure that effectively would produce an inevitable shortage of hospital beds in the case of a pandemic, something that had already been made apparent during the H1N1 pandemic and is now being made truly explicit in horrific fashion. Similar cost saving measures and systemic underfunding of the public health system can be seen in countries with universal healthcare models, which were not immune to neoliberalism’s logic of austerity, as countries like the UK now have as little as 2.7 beds per 1000 citizens.[20]
The Allocation of Risk under Capitalism
This lack of preparedness of most liberal-capitalist societies may in part represent a counter intuitive risk management strategy of a sort. A strategy that acknowledges in principle the risk of such events yet simply attempts to buffer their social and economic impacts through reactive measures — as evident in the necessity of resorting to lockdowns for the majority of countries as they scramble to prepare after the fact. Despite recent smaller scale pandemics such as the H1N1 pandemic, liberal-capitalist governments, clearly did not see preemptive investment in the infrastructure for the prevention and mitigation of pandemics as necessary relative to the other dictates that define their political-economic decision making — such as the pursuit of economic growth and balanced fiscal budgets.
As the political theorist Angela Mitropoulos has explored throughout her work, the negotiation of contingency and risk is central to how capitalism operates, both in terms of the historical emergence of its economic and legalistic practices and its operation as such.[21] As Mitropoulos details, the relationship between capitalism and risk is foundational, as ‘aleatory contracts’ such as insurance were central to the emergence of global capitalism as we know it today. Emerging within the context of mercantile trade in Italy in the late medieval period, insurance and other such contracts became increasingly central to the expansion of emerging global trade networks of the colonial era as they allowed traders to hedge the risk of the sea voyage through insurance against losses of cargo or ships at sea.[22] Mitropoulos defines aleatory contracts as follows:
They are future-oriented technologies, aleatory in form if not always in the classification. Aleatory contracts, as they are usually defined, are those contracts whose effects — the determination of gains and losses, to one or more parties to the contract — depend on the occurrence of an uncertain event.[23]
Mitropoulos goes on to explore a range of forms of the aleatory contracts that as well as insurance include the likes of “gambling, derivatives, options, and prenuptials,” and their relationship to notions of legal personhood, marriage, citizenship, employment, slavery, and otherwise.[24] The central point here as it pertains to the current pandemic is that the allocation of risk under capitalism is always unequal. Those without recourse to political-economic power and agency are burdened with the greater share of risk, while capital leverages risk in order to maximise profitability. In such a way, capital hedges risk through insurance and other forms of contracts, such as for example the casualisation of the workforce and zero hour contracts which force the worker, rather than capital, to effectively take on the risk of fluctuations in the market.
Mitropoulos’ generalised theory of contagion, wherein contagion as a metaphor is employed across “affective, financial, sexual and biological” registers is, I think, of somewhat limited use here in terms of speaking to the actual specificities of the COVID-19 pandemic in particular.[25] An inadequacy that was evident in her recent article Against Quarantine, where she critiqued the adoption of the cordon sanitaire approach being employed by certain nations at the expense of epidemiological best practice — screening at airports, testing, contact tracing, individual quarantine and social distancing — a position that was, of course, correct in the abstract.[26] Sadly, as the current pandemic unfolded it quickly became apparent that due to the fundamental lack of preparedness of the majority of our governments for such an event, and the unique risks posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus in particular, cordon sanitaire approaches such as travel bans and lock downs have been necessary, and life saving, measures in many cases.[27] That said, her critique of the way that the cordon sanitaire functions to exclude those on grounds of citizenship and race, and through doing so places them at further risk of exposure to the virus and resultant severe health impacts, is a fundamentally important one. While the cordon sanitaire has proven necessary due to a lack of preparedness, its imposition only further highlights the inherent lines of exclusion and risk allocation vis a vis the liberal-capitalist state and its conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship. A structural logic evident in the heightened risk of exposure of refugees and migrants in detention centres in countries such as the U.S. and Australia, and the exclusion of migrant workers from income support in economic relief packages.
The unequal or asymmetrical allocation of risk that Mitropoulos explores throughout her work can in many ways be illustrated most succinctly with reference to the most recent global crisis prior to the current pandemic, that of the global financial crisis (GFC). The conditions of the GFC were created as finance companies and banks took on greater and greater levels of risk, as they engaged in increasingly frivolous lending practices providing mortgages to those with less and less security (sub prime mortgages) in order to maximise their income from mortgage repayments. These mortgages would then be bundled as collateralised debt obligations that would be refinanced. In doing so effectively creating a scenario where the financial sector was massively over leveraged. When certain key institutions in the American financial landscape went into bankruptcy a snowball effect was produced in which the entire U.S. financial system fell over, sending the world spiralling into a financial crisis. The U.S. Government’s response, of course, was not to bail out the mortgage holders, many of whom went into mortgage delinquency and lost their homes (some finding themselves personally bankrupt and even homeless), but rather to spend $700 billion bailing out the financial institutions that effectively caused the crisis.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and The Unequal Distribution of Risk
As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the globe we have heard ample talk of individuals’ levels of risk of severe illness or death from the virus framed in terms of individual health factors. Public health discourse speaks of ‘higher risk’ groups developing severe cases of COVID-19: the elderly, those with underlying health conditions such as auto-immune disorders, heart disease, respiratory and kidney conditions, and the like. These are of course ‘natural’ forms of risk distribution that arise from largely contingent (disease) or necessary (aging) biological factors.[28] Indigenous groups are sometimes listed by government bodies as being at higher risk — as they often have higher instances of chronic health issues and limited access to suitable health care due to the legacy of colonialism and structural white supremacy — one of the rare instances where government discourse acknowledges, albeit superficially, how socio-economic conditions affect risk allocation. In general though, there is limited acknowledgement in public discourse at large of how socio-economic conditions or status may impact one’s exposure to risk.
As the pandemic unfolds, many who work in middle-class professions are now relatively safely working from home (retaining their source of income), while much of the working class and the precariously employed, those that work in customer service, as retail or hospitality workers, as cleaners, or in the gig-economy, now find themselves effectively unemployed. Such workers are left to the mercy of welfare systems, facing risk of exposure to the virus in order to attend mandated in person meetings at understaffed facilities. Migrant workers without citizenship are often excluded from any government support outright. Those that are still in work in such sectors now find themselves at increased risk of exposure to the virus. A recent article from politico that charted the relationship between risk of exposure and income, cited retail workers and cashiers, the very people that staff our supermarkets and other such ‘essential services,’ as the most at risk of exposure to the virus (after health workers and teachers) — occupations which of course have some of the lowest incomes in the U.S.[29]
The risk of exposure to the virus for workers in such low paid customer service industries is further exacerbated by a lack of access to paid sick leave, effectively encouraging them to work while ill. This further increases the likelihood that said workers will expose others (colleagues and customers alike) to the virus, effectively forced to work while ill due to their economic precarity or face the risk of being unable to pay rent and suffer potential eviction. In the U.S., with its largely privatised health care system, this is further compounded by a lack of access to healthcare for many workers who face exorbitant costs to even get tested for the virus let alone access medical support, a cost that may bankrupt them. It is no surprise that the capitalist class and ‘the aristocracy of labour,’ are often the first to be tested and no doubt receive the best available medical support. Significantly, we are yet to see the full social health impacts of the pandemic as it unfolds in countries across ‘the global south’ without the same level of public health infrastructure as many Western nations or the relative levels of economic wealth that can help to buffet the impacts of such a crisis.
With the pandemic still in its early stages, we are just beginning to see both the social and economic costs of the pandemic. As the crisis unfolds and lockdowns continue, ever greater numbers of workers will be out of work, businesses will close, market instability, despite the already significant bailouts of the financial sector will inevitably increase. The potential of another financial crisis on the scale of 2008 looms large. These secondary economic costs will in many ways be as significant as the primary public health impacts of the virus, as many are forced into economic hardship, homelessness, and otherwise. As the economic crisis produced by the current pandemic unfolds, we are seeing a similar bias in economic relief packages towards capital as we did in the GFC of 2008, as the majority of economic relief goes to the private sector, to bolster the stock markets and subsidise the financial losses of large airlines and other corporations, while a minority goes to workers and the unemployed.[30]
Existential Risk and The Common Good
The pandemic in many ways flags to us our basic commonality: we are all susceptible to the virus. While we may have different individual risk profiles, fundamentally we are all capable of being infected and of infecting others. We may all lose loved ones, or potentially even our own lives. No one is immune. The Danse Macabre reminds us of the basic existential fact of our mortality. In Bruegel the Elders’ Triumph of Death, the aristocracy, the church, the military, all ultimately succumb to death. The prevention of such existential risks is fundamentally a common or universal good. As the writer and ethicist Phil Torres puts it:
The reduction of existential risks constitutes a global public good, meaning that it is both non-excludable (i.e., it is not possible to prevent those who haven’t paid for this service from benefiting) and non-rivalrous (i.e., it is not the case that one person benefiting prevents others from benefiting).[31]
The tensions or contradictions between the normative values of liberal-democracy (liberty, equality, fraternity) and the material conditions of capitalism’s mode of production, as Marx termed it, have always been apparent to those willing to look, and all too painfully self evident to the exploited and excluded. Crises such as the pandemic simply make these conditions and contradictions all the more explicit, bringing them to the surface. It is clear from the barbarism of global capitalism — the systemic violence of its armies and police forces, the exploitation and dehumanisation of workers, and the denial of basic human rights to the poor and to displaced persons — that its inhumane logic forecloses the true realisation of the normative values of liberal democracy as such. Indeed, the brute utilitarian ethics of our liberal-capitalist governments coupled with the legacy of neoliberalism’s logic of austerity will continue to force doctors around the world to have to make the decision of which severely ill patient to provide with the limited ventilator support available, as it already has in Italy and elsewhere. Effectively having to decide who to give a chance at life and who will be condemned to a certain horrific death. These are the chilling decisions forced upon health professionals by their respective governments in their fundamental neglect of their responsibility to the public they are supposed to serve.
By the terms of the field of existential risk studies, the pandemic is currently only a global catastrophic risk, one below a true existential risk on its scale of risk analysis. We will be faced by true existential risks in the future, without doubt. Various allusions have been drawn between the current pandemic and the unfolding ecological crisis — the biggest existential risk humanity has yet faced. As a resident of Eora Nation, Sydney, Australia, who lived through the 2019 – 2020 bushfire season, one of unprecedented scale in which our government was grossly negligent in its responsibilities to the public, the inability of our current political-economic structures to address such existential risks seems all too apparent. No sooner had the catastrophic bushfire season ended and the smoke cleared than the pandemic began to rear its head on the horizon — the masks we used to protect ourselves against toxic bushfire smoke would be repurposed to serve as protection from the virus. Despite the apparent ‘progress’ of liberal-capitalism in terms of its narratives of economic and technological development, it seems increasingly possible that capitalism itself might well pose its own form of existential risk to both society, our species, and the planet at large. A type of risk that existential risk studies refers to as ‘subsequent ruination’ wherein, “we reach an unflawed state of technological maturity” and “social institutions, government […] bring about either the termination of our lineage or an irreversible decline in our quality of life.”[32] The unfolding global pandemic and our respective governments largely inadequate responses are a timely reminder that we must consider other political-economic possibilities if we want to continue to survive as a species and as a society,[33] and in turn save the environment and our non-human fellows from further devastation at the hands of capitalism.
Special thanks to Thomas Moynihan whose Responsibility & Existential Risk seminar with the New Centre catalysed the thought process which led to this article.
Endnotes
[1]. “The Triumph of Death,” Museo Del Prado, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-triumph-of-death/d3d82b0b-9bf2-4082-ab04-66ed53196ccc.
[2]. The Danse Macabre and related genres of European art of the time such as Memento Mori served as a kind of means of meditation or reflection of the inevitability and universality of death.
[3]. Phil Torres, Morality, Foresight & Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks (Durham: Pitchstone Publishing, 2017), Kindle Edition Loc 980-988.
[4]. William Roseberry, “Potatoes, Sacks and Enclosures,” in Golden Ages, Dark Ages, eds. Jay O’Brian and William Roseberry (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 25.
[5]. William Roseberry, “Potatoes, Sacks and Enclosures,” 25; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (New Jersey: Princeton, 1998), 93 – 124.
[6]. Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority,” Global Policy 4 (1), (March 2013): 15-31.
[7]. Although it is possible that given its global spread and secondary economic impacts it may end up being an event of such a magnitude. For definitions of the different degrees of risk, as per the terms of existential risk studies, see Torres, Morality, Foresight & Human Flourishing, Loc 328 – 340.
[8]. See Angela Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion (New York: Autonomedia, 2012).
[9]. Marisa Taylor, “U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak,” Reuters, March 23rd, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-axed-cdc-expert-job-in-china-months-before-virus-outbreak-idUSKBN21910S.
[10]. Lena H. Sun, “CDC to cut 80% of efforts to prevent global disease outbreak,” Washington Post, February 2nd, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/02/01/cdc-to-cut-by-80-percent-efforts-to-prevent-global-disease-outbreak/.
[11]. Lin Chia-nan, “Virus Outbreak: Taiwan warned WHO, China on virus last year,” Taipei Times, March 25th, 2020, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2020/03/25/2003733321.
[12]. Tom Jefferson et al, “Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses: Systematic Review,” British Medical Journal, Vol. 339 (September 2009); Corey M. Peak et al, “Comparing nonpharmaceutical interventions for containing emerging epidemics,” Proceeding of the National Academy of Science of the US, 114 (15) (April 2017): 4023-4028.
[13]. Cordon sanitaire is a French term for the restriction of movement within a given area or through borders due to public health risks. The lockdowns, travel restrictions, and border closures we are seeing in the current pandemic can be understood as an example of such
[14]. Germany seems to be a notable exception in this regard, as since the time of writing it has emerged to become a world leader in testing rates.
[15]. Taleb defines a black swan event as follows: “first, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.” See Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: Why Don’t We Learn, What We Don’t Learn? (New York: Random House, 2005), 17.
[16]. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, 35.
[17]. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, 17.
[18]. Michael Greenberger, “Better Prepare Than React: Reordering Public Health Priorities 100 Years After the Spanish Flu Epidemic,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 108 (11) (2018): 1465-1468.
[19]. Mike Davis, “Mike Davis: The Coronavirus Crisis Is a Monster Fueled by Capitalism,” In These Times, March 20th 2020, https://inthesetimes.com/article/22394/coronavirus-crisis-capitalism-covid-19-monster-mike-davis.
[20]. Compared to, for example, 13 per 1000 in Japan. See “List of countries by hospital beds,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_beds.
[21]. See Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion.
[22] Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion, 21.
[23]. Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion, 23.
[24]. Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion, 23.
[25]. Mitropoulos, Contract and Contagion, 205.
[26]. Angela Mitropoulos, “Against Quarantine,” The New Inquiry, February 13th, 2020, https://thenewinquiry.com/against-quarantine/.
[27]. Interestingly various bio-political theories have proven to map less than seamlessly onto the current pandemic, a theoretical-empirical disjuncture most evident in Giorgio Agamben’s ill-fated article where he lamented early measures taken against the in Italy virus as a kind of ‘state of exception’ that would lead to the further undermining of basic freedoms. See Giorgio Agamben, “L’invenzione di un’epidemia,” Quolibet, 26th Feburary, 2020, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia, & Panagiotis Sotiris, “Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible,” Viewpoint Magazine, March 20th 2020, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2020/03/20/against-agamben-democratic-biopolitics/.
[28]. Although it should be noted that certain professions such as, for example, construction workers are more likely to suffer from chronic respiratory conditions due to exposure to building materials such as concrete particles and the like.
[29]. Beatrice Jin and Andre McGill, “Who is most at risk in the coronavirus crisis: 24 million of the lowest-income workers,” Politico, 21st March 2020, https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-impact-on-low-income-jobs-by-occupation-chart/.
[30]. Just after the completion of this article the US just announced the largest bailout in US history (over 2 trillion US dollars), with corporations receiving the largest share of the bailout. See Lauren Artanai, “$1,200 stimulus checks for all? What to know about the US coronavirus bailout,” The Guardian, 26th March, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-us-bailout-what-you-need-to-know.
[31]. Torres, Morality, Foresight & Human Flourishing, Loc 366.
[32]. Torres, Morality, Foresight & Human Flourishing, Loc 381.
[33]. A key architect of the neoliberal project, Margaret Thatcher’s, rather telling statement that “there is no such thing as society” comes to mind.