Behind the Mask: a roundup of links on Covid and society
Hello all! I wanted to provide a roundup of some links and thoughts having to do with society and Covid-19. I’ll call this collection, for now, Behind the Mask because I’m less and less interested in whether people are Behaving Well in the context of Covid, and more about how structures of control and capital condition options in seen and unseen ways. I’ve tried to keep the less depressing material towards the top. I am trying to emulate the useful posts of James Stein, a Wisconsin cardiologist, on Facebook. 
Mutual Aid
Our governments are failing. We can work within them to change our systems, or we can work around them to provide alternatives. This website (https://covidmutualaid.org/local-groups/) provides a database of mutual aid organizations around the world. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but for Baltimore (where I live) it seems pretty comprehensive. The next question I would have is how to link them up together into larger structures. (Organize! But that’s usually presented as a matter of bringing individuals into groups, e.g. unions. But how do you bring nascent groups together?)
Schools – what next?
There are dueling statements from the American Association of Pediatrics (which issued a statement, then revised it) and any number of other groups. In Maryland, a consortium of teacher groups and PTAs called for the fall term to be entirely on-line. Whether schools are “open” or “closed” depends, obviously, on where the school is and what those words mean – but the effect on children, parents, teachers, and staff depends on truths that obtained pre-pandemic: who is supported and who is policed, who is advanced and who is expelled, who taught and who arrested. This heartrending story illustrates how. (https://www.propublica.org/article/a-teenager-didnt-do-her-online-schoolwork-so-a-judge-sent-her-to-juvenile-detention) This says less about in-person vs on-line teaching and more about the pandemic reflecting pre-existing injustices.
Why Don’t I Know More People with Covid?
You might. Or you might not live in a neighborhood with a high concentration of Covid patients. Or maybe you do have Covid. This piece does as good a job as any I’ve seen in describing the intersecting realms of housing, economics, and racism – and Covid. https://theappeal.org/coronavirus-racial-disparities-residential-segregation/
Vaccines by Themselves Won’t Save Us
The first stage of a vaccine trial was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022483). But once there’s a vaccine, some people won’t feel comfortable getting it. Even those who might consider themselves as pro-vaccine. Why is that? Read more here — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X15015339?
Causes of Death
A recent pair of articles in JAMA show that, during covid, there have been more deaths than in recent years – due to non-covid causes (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768086). There are several potential explanations for this (we are undercounting covid deaths, or imprecisely measuring cause of death) but this reflects a lack of support for human life within our system that quibbling over cause-of-death advocacy, the way one usually does in the US, won’t help.
