This week, worldwide cases of COVID19 are approaching 50 million, with daily diagnoses surpassing 500,000 globally per day, and the novel coronavirus is killing over 50,000 people per week.

And here in the US, despite the dramatic near conclusion of our fall elections and now nearly 8 months into our period of national social isolation, we continue as the world leader in COVID19 deaths, with about 20% of the world’s fatalities and only 5% of the world’s population.  This week, with a new fall/winter surge of the disease now upon us, we saw 7,072 COVID19 deaths here in the US.  That’s about 1,000 COVID19 deaths per day, or two times the number of 9/11 deaths per week, or at least 70 times the number of US soldiers who died on average per week in the 10 years of the Viet Nam War.

Yahoo News just today is reporting a kindergartner in Texas and an election poll worker from Missouri who both recently died from COVID19.  And governors across the country are pleading with their residents to continue to take this virus seriously.

So how could it be that nearly half of American voters did not vote to change our national leadership in this setting of monumental failure?  What does it say that the elections were close enough to allow the Science-denier in Chief to have any standing whatsoever for contesting the vote counts still pending at the end of this very anxious and painful week?

And most importantly, I think for most of us, is where do we go from here?  What pathway, what vision do we need to arrive at the social and economic justice endpoints that will actually address the existential threats of climate, health, poverty, race, and war?  And especially, now in the context of the apparent wins and losses that we have witnessed so far this week, what is that collective vision that we might all share and use to make progress?

Watch the PDA Healthcare Emergency Town Hall, November 8, 2020

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