This has been a weird year and keeps getting weirder. These are some of the things I hope we learn, not forget and do right going forward.
1 - tying healthcare to employment is a bi-product of the wage freeze that happened during WWII. It isn't how it "was always done" or "motivates people to not be lazy". In fact it discourages entrepreneurship, makes it harder for companies to compete in a global market and has been one of the main reasons for inflation in healthcare costs (lots of studies around this). Can we all just acknowledge that we might need to rethink this one?
2 - We are global. Cat's out of the bag, it's never going back. Start dealing with what the world is, not what you want it to be.
3 - Supply side economic policies, though essential, must be balanced with demand side economic policies. It's not an either or. Companies are nothing without people to buy their stuff and workers to make it. And when you sway too far one way or the other, the economy gets warped and less able to adapt. We are watching it play out right now.
4 - all those folks who people are posting memes about thanking what are normally low wage workers, a good percentage are receiving government assistance in some manner. Most of our "social programs" help those who do work full time but don't make enough and work for places that don't offer things like health insurance. Next year, there is a good chance these same heroes in your memes will be stuck because they made a lot with overtime this year that they might not qualify next year for programs, even though they will not make the same amount next year. Don't punish them next year for the one good thing happening to them considering how much risk they are in. We all go to the grocery stores, we know what the average range of the workers there are. Don't be a dick.
5 - Science education is essential. Science education teaches people how to question, how to research and basics like why washing your damn hands is important. People didn't seem to know that there are over 320,000 viruses that can impact mammals, that viruses mutate all the damn time (like hello the flu and the common cold is not each 1 virus, but mutating like F'rs that are constantly changing) and immunity is a really big dead is really really really depressing to find out now. This is like measles for Europeans and the Native Americans, measles was bad for Europeans but they had a built up level of immunity because of decades of exposure, that wasn't the case for Native Americans, and Covid-19 is in the no immunity phase. The fact that people didn't know how washing your hands kills germs works blew my mind.
6 - Math education is essential. Exponential is a big deal. 2x10 is 20, 2 to the 10 is 1,024. Math education is essential because it is going to take that learning how to do research and questioning and help you then understand what you're reading. A study that only has 12 subjects is not concrete. Especially when the group they represent includes roughly 1.3 million people. It helps to understand that if a death rate is a "low" 1.5% of infected and 8-12% needed to be on ventilators for 1-2 weeks, is a highly contagious disease because it has a transmission rate of 2.1 per 1 infected and we 62,000 ventilators in the US for a population of 327 million with some already in use for other diseases, maybe, the goal of trying to slow the roll of Covid-19 was so that way we as a country didn't need to determine who lives and who dies because there would be no ventilators to put not just Covid-19 cases but all the other people who might need a ventilator.
Sorry, we think the economy is taking a hit now, can you imagine the fear that would happen if you knew you went out and got in a car accident that might need to put you on a ventilator for a day or two because your lung was injured would do to society? That getting sick, any kind of sick, might mean no matter how great your insurance is you might not get treatment? People who saw friends battling and winning against cancer dropping because their immune system was so shot that this virus that is still WAY less deadly than measles takes them out. That having a baby in a hospital became a no go because infants really don't have much of an immunity. Like seriously, think about what people would do. Yeah, that's why DeWine is the Shit. He can math and he hires people who science.