I'm Gene Zembe, you are listening to Code Switch from MPR.

Shireen is off this week.

So even now, all these months into our new way of doing things, there is still so much we don't

know about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, we're still adding to the list of known

symptoms, still trying to figure out a testing protocol since so many of the people spreading it,

don't have any symptoms, is it entirely airborne, how long does it last on services, when,

if ever, will we have a vaccine? And just as Monday, researchers in Hong Kong confirmed that someone

was reinfected with coronavirus months after they first contracted it, which is not how viruses

typically work. And leaving aside all these big scientific questions, we still don't know how

is going to affect our country long term. Airports, still mostly empty. Schools are reopening,

and parents are weighing whether it's safe to send their children back to school.

Joblessness is at the highest rate since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Millions of people are in danger of losing their homes, and more than 175,000 people in the US

have died from this virus. So just how is it that the richest, the most powerful nation in the world,

has been laid low by a virus that's only a few dozen nanometers in size?

Ed Young, a science writer for the Atlantic, has spent the last seven months covering the

coronavirus. His September cover story for the magazine is titled, How the Pandemic Defeated America.

And in it, he says, it's the inequities that have been with us for generations in some cases

for centuries that made our body politic such opportunistic targets. In other words,

this has a lot to do with class and race. I mean, this is close which after all.

Ed wrote, quote, water running along a pavement or readily seep into every crack. So too,

did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every fault line in the modern world?

...