Even though the COVID-19 pandemic is viewed primarily as a global health crisis, having claimed over 130,000 lives worldwide, we are only beginning to understand how this pandemic will deeply impact our nation economically, politically, culturally and socially—and how those far-ranging impacts are dependent on the multitude of identities, situations and communities that make up our country. For example, we are seeing with horror the nurses, doctors and other frontline workers who are forced to work unprotected and falling sick, the low income workers who were already struggling who are now out of a job (over 22 million people have filed for unemployment) waiting on long lines at food banks across the country, or the recent concerning reports that coronavirus is killing black and Latino people in places like New York City at twice the rate that it is killing white people, a racial disparity which reflects longstanding economic inequalities and differences in access to health care.
