It doesn't necessarily follow, as the writer argues, that "vulnerable" is best defined as his favorite SJW categories:
This pandemic is an X-ray, exposing the racial and class inequalities of our society.It's fair enough to note that people without safety margins of all kinds are far more likely to be swallowed up in severe disruptions. COVID-19, however, is unusual in its extreme focus on the elderly, which, unfortunately for the Guardian, can't easily be shoehorned into the SJW worldview. No amount of Marxist thinking will solve the problem of a disease whose median age of case fatality is around 80, or whose deadly impact falls in over 99% of cases on a group comprise of the elderly and/or those with fairly severe medical challenges. At most, the carnage in nursing homes might make us want to re-think how we warehouse the elderly of all races and classes.
You can make a class argument out of the disparity in certain kinds of illnesses, especially those related to obesity (such as heart disease and diabetes), but the argument isn't as persuasive as a lot of people seem to think. When you have to blame "food deserts" for obesity among people who supposedly are too poor to eat, you're really reaching.
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The "obesity is caused by food deserts" argument always made me scratch my head. The argument apparently goes "poor people don't have access to fresh produce, so they eat calorie rich, fatty food". I hate to tell you, but for the vast and overwhelming majority of humanity both in history and currently, access to "calorie rich, fatty food" is highly sought after. Why? Because survival depends on it. Eating fastidiously, and on low calorie vegitables is a poor diet. It is only due to the incredible wealth in the US that a high caloric diet is considered undesirable. Our poor are so wealthy they are able to become fat.
It's the same thing with vegan and strict vegetarian diets. They are a product of either very poor equatorial nations (i.e. those that can sustain year round farming) or extremely wealthy first world nations (who can afford either expensive greenhouse farming, or simply importing out of season foods). It is a luxury in the West, brought on by extreme wealth. In the lingo of the "woke", it is a privileged lifestyle choice.
The carnage in the nursing homes may make us want to rethink how we warehouse the elderly, but in Italy the death toll was in mixed-generation households. Death cannot always be stood off. Sometimes the lesson is that bad things happen no matter what you do, and you can't really fix things. You just have to do the best that you can, with whatever few things really are in your power.
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