All COVID-19 patient names have been replaced with pseudonyms to protect their privacy.
Sal waves through his phone screen, glossy maps adorning his brown wall in the background. He holds the mic on his earbuds closer to his lips to speak. Smiling every once in a while, his voice is steady as he tells me about how he and his father both fought through COVID-19 earlier this summer.
“There’s the stress of having it. Like that diagnosis, that positive, it was unlike any other stress I had felt in my whole life. Like, I don't want my dad to die, I don’t want anyone in my family to die, I don’t want my family to be wiped out by coronavirus… I feel like that’s normal, that’s human.”
This spring, as thousands of high school seniors across the U.S. mourned the loss of their graduations, their proms, their last spring sports seasons, their final hurrahs, thousands of Americans mourned the deaths of their loved ones. As I write this, there have been 5.37M confirmed cases and 169K deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S.
Sal’s dad is a truck driver. When COVID-19 broke out in New York early April, he told his boss that he didn’t want to make his trip north from South Carolina. Yet he was told that if he didn’t drive, he didn’t have a job. So he continued to work. After meeting someone with COVID-19 at a station, who was still at work and wasn’t wearing a mask for some reason, Sal’s dad returned home, fell ill, then later tested positive. Sal’s family members, who live in a one-story house, were unable to isolate him. “[Others] were like, ‘why don’t you just go down to the basement?’ Well, we don’t have any of that,” Sal explained, “It’s so unrealistic to ask people to quarantine themselves if they live in a normal four-bedroom house.”
To make matters worse, Sal’s dad was already immunocompromised after battling cancer a few years ago. He had to make the decision between getting treatment, or keeping his family out of serious debt. Both Sal and his younger brother have not had health insurance for the past few years. Sal said that he truly believed his dad was going to die when he tested positive, and that he had already begun making plans to drop out of school in the fall to support his family.
I listened to another story of a high schooler who contracted COVID-19 this summer. Levi is a private high school student who lives in Huntington Valley, Ohio. He has quick access to their family doctor over the phone, whom he contacted when he began experiencing symptoms. After getting tested at a clinic, a 24-hour wait period, and receiving a few over-the-counter meds, he stayed quarantined in his room for five days, and did not leave his house for a week. Levi did not feel scared or stressed.
How did Sal and Levi experience this pandemic so differently? I’m sure you know the answer. Class, and inevitably, race. But class and race are not the problem -- it’s classism and racism.
The difference between the lives of these students is also evident in the number of Covid patients that they personally know. When asked if they knew anyone else with COVID-19, Levi, my project partners, and even I myself could only think of one other person, if any. Sal, however, nodded. “I heard a lot of personal stories, because... I’ve been living in a low-income county. [My] friends, they were like: ‘My dad or mom is an essential worker, like they’re a barber, they do nails, they're a nail tech, they’re, you know, a restaurant manager.’ And you’re putting all these low-income people back in their jobs early, before you have a control over what can happen, and all these [COVID] cases skyrocketed.”
Thankfully, Sal and his father both recovered smoothly. However, Sal expressed anger over how his state handled the pandemic. “There was one county, in Georgia, they had one doctor. And... Georgia opened up early, and he died. And that was it. That county didn’t have a doctor anymore…. So many people have died.” I could only shake my head in bewilderment, trying to grasp the difference between hearing of death and truly experiencing death. I’m privileged, and it shows...
“If I die, I die,” a shirtless, burnt, and pasty college student in Florida chuckles to a reporter, before walking off with friends. It appears, I noticed grimly, that the younger generation -- myself included -- does not treat the COVID-19 pandemic as seriously because we, to some extent, believe we are invincible. We transmit stories that say “it simply feels like a bad cold.”
Yet to some, it’s much worse. And most of us who still believe it’s just “a bad cold” are those who are privileged enough to never experience the “worse.” Keeping in mind my intended audience for this article -- Hawken and other Northeast Ohio students, majority middle-class and white -- I’ll just say it straight: we are protected by a system that, though we live in it unintentionally, perpetuates racial and class inequities. These inequities are what lead to the health disparities that we see in the data. COVID-19 simply plays a small part. According do the compilation of statistics by APM Research, “for each 100,000 Americans (of their respective group), about 80 Blacks have died from the coronavirus, the highest actual mortality rate of all groups—above Asians (33), Whites (36), Latinos (46), Pacific Islanders (59) and Indigenous people (67).”
Dr. Timothy Black, Associate Professor of Sociology and Interim Director of the Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University, phrased the complex issue simply. With hospitals being privatized and a public health system employed to squeeze out profit, we “no longer have a system that effectively takes care of the population... That's the problem. We have a system that puts profit before people.”
Hospitals in Cleveland, when they were built, only accepted White Christian patients. This July, Cuyahoga County declared racism a public health crisis, taking a legislative step towards solving the problem. Andre Lessears, Director for the Office of Diversity & Inclusion for Cleveland Clinic Akron General, explains that by declaring racism a health crisis, the “designation will allow [the hospitals] to funnel resources to address racism.” Yet for individuals, a legislative declaration means nothing without action, and it is our duty to resist virtue signaling and allyship performance. As a new generation on the brink of true, positive, societal change, we must hear call out the performance. We must heed Dr. Black’s advice. “Be in struggle. Stay in solidarity.”
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