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The Medical Waste Winter of Our Discontent
Discarded masks and gloves are everywhere. Is littering cool again?
Well into year three of the COVID-19 pandemic national emergency, things seem as bad as ever.
Even considering the advent of vaccines, better information about COVID-19 treatment, transmission and who is at most risk of hospitalization and death, uncertainty, fear and anxiety persist with a vengeance.
The pandemic also created or worsened other problems.
“When the tide goes out,” as the famous investor Warren Buffet once opined, “you learn who’s been swimming naked.”
Covid, like the pandemics, natural disasters and wars before it, sharply exposed some of the long-simmering injustices and inequities underpinning our society. Gaps in the public education system; the school to prison pipeline; lack of adequate mental health care and drug addiction counseling; unequal outcomes for minority groups and the economically disadvantaged; over-dependence on a 10,000 mile petroleum fueled supply chain coupled with an erosion of American domestic manufacturing capacity: Covid didn’t cause these problems, it just made them harder to ignore.
There is a worsening supply-chain crisis, wherein U.S. big box retailers are currently placing their product orders…for Christmas 2022- because that’s…