Guest Post by Steve Lamb
I live in Southern California, where generations of my family have lived since the 1880s. All I know about the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1919 I learned through history books in university. My grandmother wouldn’t talk about it. Oddly, in the case of a pandemic, the past to me is not so very helpful.
In the case of the present pandemic, first-hand observation will have to suffice. Since shutting down for two weeks to “bend the curve” on March 16, Los Angeles County has lived under endless restriction. The closest thing we have seen to normalcy is restaurant dining outdoors and limited numbers of people being allowed to shop in essential stores as defined by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Los Angeles County never really saw new cases of the coronavirus go down significantly. Now it is rampant, and our hospitals are full of the merely sick and the almost dead.
Continue reading “Southern California’s Neoliberal Impacts During the Pandemic”