Op-Ed: New COVID strains are coming. It’s no time to let down our guard.
By
In the spring of 2020, in an effort to help the global economy by helping people, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched the Pandemic Response Portal. In that first day of operation, HHS asked the public to take a pledge to take action while the portal was open.
The Pledge
The Pledge begins,
Every day I will commit to working as hard as I can to help make this public health crisis a success, keeping with the public health spirit of this moment. I pledge to: — Pledge to take action for myself and my family to protect our health — Pledge to take action for my community’s health and safety — Pledge to take action for the health of my friends and family — Pledge to take action to ensure the safety of my community and all people living within our borders
In a little over one week, thousands of people around the country pledged to take action. As you might expect, that pledge, as well as the promise to work hard and find ways to keep our communities safe, have become an ongoing source of inspiration for people as they work to build a safer, healthier world. But, as the pandemic continues to spread, many Americans have not taken this pledge because of an unwillingness to put themselves at risk.
We are a nation with a robust middle class and robust middle-class wages. What many Americans would like to do is look to employers, who are already willing to pay a full-time employee a full-time wage for part-time work, to provide a full-time wage for a part-time worker for the duration of the pandemic. It’s a simple fact that this is not an ideal situation, but it is reality, and we will take all that we have learned in how to build health care systems to mitigate this challenge. That’s because as we go into our most anxious period in American history, we are going to face unprecedented challenges, and it will be up to us to build a resilient world for our children.
But as Americans, we have a duty to take action. And it is in the spirit of the Pledge of Every Day that I write this Op-Ed.
Our World Is Not Secure
Despite the fact that the pandemic has been contained in the United States, our world is not secure. Here are