Why This Old Painting From 1893 Is Going ‘Viral’ All Over Again In these 'coronatimes,' The Scream has taken on new significance, summoned once again to represent our anxieties of illness and death, of economic recession and of societal collapse. by Allison Morehead

Few works of art are as iconic as The Scream, by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). The combination of an open mouth, eyes wide open and two hands raised to cheeks has become a near-universal signifier of shock and existential fear, helped along by 1990s movie franchises such as Scream and Home Alone. Not to mention the scream emoji.

In these “coronatimes,” The Scream has taken on new significance, summoned once again to represent our anxieties of illness and death, of economic recession and of societal collapse.

Versions of The Scream have proliferated online. There are Screams with face masks or even as face masks. There are Screams anxious about handwashing and face touching, and Screams with eyes drawn in the now recognizable shape of the coronavirus. Screaming figures are fleeing cities and financial institutions. They are hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

Poignant images

Most of these coronavirus Scream images tap into our collective fears and transform them through humour. But there are more poignant images as well. Consider a “social distancing” Scream created by Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief of the art site Hyperallergic.

Vartanian digitally altered the image so that only a single lone individual remains in the background.

Vartanian said:

“I wanted to create something jarring that reminds us to look at familiar things in new ways, just like we’re doing with our lives in the era of social distancing.”

And then there’s 2020 Plague Expulsion Rite, a photo collage by Shenzhen-based photographer Wu Guoyong. After collaborating with Luo Dawei, who runs the photo platform Fengmian, to curate a series of family portraits of Chinese New Year in quarantine, Wu gathered together 3,500 images of lockdown to create a collective Scream.

2020 Plague Expulsion Rite poses profound questions: if we are all screaming, and if we imagine everyone else screaming, is it possible to feel less alone? And if we are all screaming together, how else might we act collectively in these times?

‘Quaking with angst’

After numerous sketches and some false starts, Munch completed a first version of The Scream in 1893 while living in Berlin, where his avant-garde circle enthusiastically received it as an embodiment of modern angst bordering on mental illness.

Carefully conceived for maximum emotional effect, Munch intended the work to be a powerful image that would represent an intense emotional experience that he had while walking along a fjord in his native Norway. He also tried to put that experience into words:

“I was walking along the road with two friends — the sun was setting — I felt a wave of sadness — the sky suddenly turned blood-red. I stopped, leaned against the fence tired to death … My friends walked on — stood there quaking with angst — and I felt as though a vast, endless scream passed through nature.”

Munch created three more versions of The Scream, a lithograph and a pastel in 1895, and another painting, probably in 1910.

The Scream has a dramatic history. The 1893 version was stolen and then recovered in 1994. Ten years later, the 1910 version was also stolen and recovered, albeit damaged. In 2012, the pastel version was auctioned for the record sum of nearly US$120 million. Now, as reported by the Guardian, conservators recommend that the 1910 painting practise its own physical distancing to avoid further damage from human breath.

Staring, open-mouthed figures

Throughout his long career, Munch often represented the despair and fear provoked by deadly diseases not yet well understood by modern medicine, including tuberculosis, syphilis and influenza. A staring, open-mouthed figure, often alienated from its body, recurred in those representations.

Before The Scream, Munch produced a drawing in one of his early sketchbooks, probably a self-portrait, and captioned it “Influenca.” A figure doubled, frightened and frightening, looks back at us from a mirror. His eyes are wide open and his tongue is sticking out. Perhaps he is saying “aaahhh” and waiting for a diagnosis.

Munch suffered from lung and bronchial problems throughout his life, possibly related to the tuberculosis that killed his mother and sister when he was a child. In 1919, he was one of the few artists to respond to the worldwide flu pandemic. In a large self-portrait simply titled Spanish Flu, the artist turns his head to the viewer, eyes strangely vacant, and opens his mouth to … what? Speak? Cough? Gasp for breath? Scream?

Rise in cult status

The Scream gained its cult status only after the artist’s death in 1944.

While the full story of its emergence into popular culture remains to be told, key early moments are probably a Time magazine cover from 1961 with the banner “Guilt & Anxiety,” and a 1973 book by Reinhold Heller about Munch’s iconic painting.

In recent years, The Scream has been used to raise awareness of climate change, to critique and protest Brexit as well as the presidency of Donald Trump in the United States.

Anxiety about nuclear proliferation also speaks through The Scream. In 2009, graphic designer Małgorzata Będowska transformed the instantly recognizable nuclear hazard sign into an iconic mashup for the poster Nuclear Emergency. The striking design has since become commonplace at anti-nuclear events.

A common visual language

We might turn to the arts to soothe ourselves in times of crisis and stress. But in those same times, history has shown that art can help us to express or deal with difficult emotions, including those stemming from our experiences of illness.

The internet-enabled global circulation of The Scream is intensifying in an age of political instability and a pandemic enabled by globalization. The increasing virality of The Scream demonstrates the ongoing need for a common visual language to communicate and to cope with what many fear the most: the shared vulnerability of having a body that might become ill, suffer and die.

Don't Listen to the ‘China Covered Up the Coronavirus’ Narrative China made some mistakes, as did every country, in responding to the coronavirus, but China’s overall response was more effective than most countries, with domestic quarantines of inter-city travelers, widespread mask-wearing, and a testing and tracing regime with access to a vast trove of data. by Mitchell Blatt

Since President Donald Trump’s early optimism that coronavirus was “under control” and “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero” has proven to be false hope, he has been trying to turn China into a scapegoat. He is attacking China and blaming them for the fact that America has 1.6 million confirmed cases of coronavirus and ninety-five thousand deaths, even though many of the reasons for the severe outbreak here have to do with mistakes by governors, government agencies, and Donald Trump himself. 

China, for example, did not decide to continue to allow 140,000 travelers to fly into the U.S. from Italy, twice as many as the amount that came in from China, and 1.7 million from the rest of Europe, for weeks after Italy had become a hot spot, without so much as temperature checks or fourteen-day quarantines upon arrival. 

China made some mistakes, as did every country, in responding to the coronavirus, but China’s overall response was more effective than most countries, with domestic quarantines of inter-city travelers, widespread mask-wearing, and a testing and tracing regime with access to a vast trove of data. And the claims of a “cover-up” are inaccurate. They are nothing but a cover for politicians and countries with antagonistic relationships towards China to defend themselves in front of their domestic publics and to pressure China internationally.

The claims of a “cover-up” are increasingly vague—Trump blamed “some wacko in China” on Twitter on May 20 but the claims typically rest on a few premises:

1.) the claim that China undercounted the number of cases and deaths

2.) the claim that China did not respond quickly enough 

3.) the claim that China denied that the virus could spread between humans 

 4.) outrage over the detention of Dr. Li Wenliang and others 

Arguments one through three are largely inaccurate, while point four is a valid criticism but not evidence of a cover-up and not relevant to the global spread of coronavirus. Overall, China’s critics are holding China to a higher degree of competence and transparency than they are holding democratic countries. 

First, there is little evidence that China fabricated or intentionally undercounted deaths in most of the country, which is what a “cover-up” would describe. It is true that the official number of deaths in China, like every other country, almost certainly is missing some people who died at home or undiagnosed.

The New York Times reported in April that coronavirus cases across the country were not being counted because tests were lacking, and many likely coronavirus deaths in February and early March were attributed to the flu. Officials in California were able to confirm the deaths of coronavirus as early as February 6, three weeks before the first recorded death. Data on Florida’s coronavirus dashboard shows people reporting coronavirus-like symptoms as early as January 1. The manager who oversaw that data was fired after protesting an order to remove some of the data.

The dismissals of many officials who were propagating information their superiors did not want to be shared shows a commonality and difference between the political systems of the United States and China. Here, there have also been attempts to downplay or hide criticisms or negative information on the government’s response, but it is dealt with through firings, reassignments, and official rebukes. Dr. Rick Bright, for example, testified to the House of Representatives that he was removed from his position leading the team involved in creating a vaccine after warning about shortages of PPE and disagreeing with the administration’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine even for people who weren’t hospitalized.

Undercounting is taking place in Europe, too. In Madrid, over three thousand people had died in nursing homes without having been tested. The Economist reported in its April 18 issue, “France’s figures include deaths that occur in care homes—nearly half the total—white Britain’s do not.” Given what we know about how the elderly are most at risk and how nursing homes have become hotbeds everywhere, not counting deaths of their residents would have a significant impact and would be something a regime could do if it wanted to artificially limit its reported numbers.

The number of cases reported by different cities and regions in China shows a strong correlation with the amount of outbound travel from Wuhan to those regions, multiple papers have found. That would indicate that the numbers reported in each region were relatively accurate and not fabricated. If the numbers were fabricated, then there would not necessarily be expected to be any correlation between Wuhan migrants and cases reported. Because coronavirus originated in Wuhan, the regions with the highest number of migrants arriving from Wuhan had the highest numbers. 

Details about the situation in Wuhan itself are probably the most hazy and would be the most likely to have been intentionally manipulated, both because local officials early on (and before knowing the severity) might have felt motivated to keep it from hurting their careers and because the most egregious mistakes would have happened in Wuhan.

Reportedly, the CIA has concluded that China undercounted its numbers, and photos of urns piling up in Wuhan were cited as evidence that many more had died in the central China city. While the CIA report has not been publicly released, the Bloomberg article reporting on it cites that, “The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total,” which would not make China’s numbers terribly different from those of many other countries. 

Icelandic data suggests that as many as half of people with coronavirus show no symptoms, which means that they would not be tested in most countries. The Catalonia region of Spain also revised its numbers upward, doubling them, in April. The Daily Beast reported on May 13 that the Trump administration is pressing the CDC to change its reporting methodology to exclude coronavirus deaths for which the victim was not tested. 

A study by Timothy Russell, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that China’s official numbers might have only documented one-third of all its coronavirus cases, but the same study found the UK, Italy, and Spain documented about 10 percent of their cases. Yet only China is being singled out with the “cover-up” label. 

Ex-post facto, we know that coronavirus was spreading in Wuhan in December, and, as of March, the first known case was traced back to November 17. Now athletes on the French and Spanish teams have said they fell sick with what they think could have been coronavirus at the Military Games held in Wuhan in October. At the time, they thought it was the flu, indicating the difficulty of discerning a rare, unknown-at-the-time disease, which has symptoms similar to other diseases. 

Doctors in Wuhan took note of the cluster of pneumonia cases in December but attributed it to an unknown cause as the coronavirus had not been discovered at that point. American doctors could not recognize that some of their patients had coronavirus in February and March, either.  

“When I was working before we had testing, we had a ton of patients with pneumonia. I remember thinking it was weird. I’m sure some of those patients did have it. But no one knew back then,” Geraldine Ménard, chief of general internal medicine at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans, said to the New York Times. 

Dr. Li Wenliang messaged colleagues about the similarities to SARS on December 30. He was detained on January 3 and released the same day with a warning but no formal charges. Virus samples were shipped to Fudan University in Shanghai on January 5, and the results of the tests, that it was SARS-CoV2, or the coronavirus, were announced to the world on January 9.  

So the detention of Li did not impact the speed of China’s response nor the global spread of the virus. It might well have put Li and his colleagues at greater risk of contracting coronavirus. There was a concerted effort by Wuhan government officials and hospital officials to deny that healthcare workers were getting sick and to even prevent doctors and nurses from wearing masks at some hospitals. Li was clearly a victim. The Chinese government did issue an apology and criticize the Wuhan Public Security Bureau. Whether the apology is sincere or meant to appease local and international anger is another matter. Either way, China’s actions to Li do not explain the spread of the virus or absolve the rest of the world for their failures. 

The timeline of China’s response is all in Caixin Global’s article, the same article that has been cited by outlets such as The National Review to push the “cover-up” case. On January 3, according to Caixin Global, China’s National Health Commission “ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them.” The National Review’s Tobias Hoonhout describes this as a “gag order” (in January, not “late December). But the samples arrived at the facility two days later. Is taking one week to conduct the tests—as opposed to some hypothetical time frame in a different scenario—is a slow response? 

National governments, such as the U.S. government, have taken longer than one week to respond even after already knowing that coronavirus was a threat. Even in March, Trump was comparing the coronavirus to the flu. It took him twenty days to put any restrictions on flights from Italy after Italy began locking down cities.  

Finally, China was downplaying the potential for human transmission amongst people who showed symptoms. It was not until January 20, that they announced that the virus had been confirmed through study to be communicable, although most viruses, particularly a virus in the coronavirus group, should be assumed to be potentially communicable, barring evidence to the contrary, which is exactly why Taiwanese and Hong Kongese health officials were already working on that assumption before January 20.  

At the time, however, no doctors and scientists could have been expected to know that coronavirus spreads between people who do not show symptoms of being sick. By late January, there were apparent cases of asymptomatic transmission being observed, and China’s health ministry did issue a warning about asymptomatic transmission on January 31. But it took months for the United States CDC or the Surgeon General, or health organizations in other Western countries, to recommend widespread mask-wearing.  

That—and the high R0—were the main reasons coronavirus spread so quickly and so widely. The 2003 outbreak of SARS did not spread asymptomatically or pre-symptomatically. That, also, is likely why foreign governments did not respond quickly or deliberately enough.

It could be that governments are fallible, that no government could be expected to respond perfectly to even the most trivial challenges, let alone a crisis of unprecedented scale. It could be that coronavirus is the “disease x”—the disease that both spreads extremely quickly and kills at a relatively high rate.

To hold that China could have or should have been able to know from day one that these cases of pneumonia were actually coming from a new virus, or that it should have known the virus spread through the breath of apparently healthy people, and that it should have been able to track every case of the virus, is, somewhat ironically, to hold China to higher standards than the most developed democratic countries in the world. When China mishandles a pandemic, it is ascribed to malfeasance; when the United States and Europe do, it is the ordinary, expected incompetence.

It’s not only an inaccurate narrative, and one that is being used to absolve domestic leaders of responsibility for their mistakes, but it is also in a sense an anti-democracy narrative.

How Natural Disasters Affect Migration in the U.S. The study shows that people move away from areas hit by the largest natural disasters, but smaller disasters have little effect on migration. by Leah Platt Boustan, Maria Lucia Yanguas, Matthew Kahn and Paul W. Rhode

Every year, major earthquakes, floods and hurricanes occur. These natural disasters disrupt daily life and, in the worst cases, cause devastation. Events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy killed thousands of people and generated billions of dollars in losses.

There is also concern that global climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of weather–related disasters.

Our research team wanted to know how disasters affect people’s decisions to move in or out of particular areas. We created a new database that covers disasters in the United States from 1920 to 2010 at the county level, combining data from the American Red Cross as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its predecessors.

Our work shows that people move away from areas hit by the largest natural disasters, but smaller disasters have little effect on migration. The data also showed that these trends may worsen inequality in the U.S., as the rich move away from disaster-prone areas, while the poor are left behind.

Changing risks

The U.S. is a large country, with many regions that differ with respect to their risk of suffering a natural disaster. For example, coastal areas or areas in the flood plain of a river are more likely to experience a natural disaster, whereas areas at higher elevation are at lower risk.

Florida and areas on the Gulf of Mexico are wracked by hurricanes; New England and the Atlantic seaboard are battered by winter storms; the Midwest is a tornado-prone region; and counties along the Mississippi River are subject to recurrent flooding.

There are comparatively few disasters in the West, with the exception of California, which is affected primarily by droughts and fires. (However, the small number of disasters declared in the Mountain West may reflect the limited population in the area.)

Technological innovation has reduced our exposure to damages from disasters. Infrastructure in the U.S. has been upgraded to reduce risks posed by flooding, high winds and earthquakes.

Furthermore, we now have access to real-time information that allows us to be aware of emerging threats. In Asia, for example, tsunami warnings are distributed by text message. Accurate early warning systems are likely to help us adapt, reducing the death count from disasters.

Yet, as of 2010, 39 percent of the U.S. population lived in coastal areas that feature greater risks of hurricane, floods and earthquakes.

Add to this process the wild card of climate change. Basic climate science suggests that, as global greenhouse gas emissions increase, so too will the quantity and severity of natural disasters.

How disasters shape an area

We used our new database to explore whether areas hit by natural disasters lost more residents to migration than areas that were comparatively calm.

We found that, if a county experienced two natural disasters, migration out of that county increased by one percentage point, with the strongest reactions happening in response to hurricanes. This translates into a loss of around 600 residents from a typical county. The effect of one very large disaster – responsible for 100 or more deaths – was twice as big.

Poverty rates also increased by one percentage point in areas hit by super-severe disasters. That suggests that people who aren’t poor are migrating out or that people who are poor are migrating in. It might also mean that the existing population transitioned into poverty. We contrasted decades with high disaster activity to decades of comparable calm, thus making it unlikely that we are simply observing areas with higher poverty rates.

We were particularly interested in learning how the 1978 advent of FEMA – the agency that coordinates federal response to natural disasters – may have influenced the likelihood that people will migrate away following a disaster event. One might expect that residents would be less likely to move out of disaster-struck areas after this date, if FEMA increased payments of federal disaster relief.

Yet, we found that, if anything, residents were more likely to migrate out of counties struck by natural disasters after FEMA was created. This pattern is consistent with recent research documenting that the federal funds that flow to victims of disasters come mainly in the form of non-place-based programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps. It appears that many people in disaster-affected areas take the money and move to another county.

Finally, we compared the behavior of people living in low- and high-risk counties. People in areas very prone to suffer disasters – such as counties on a coastline or in a river plain – were three times more likely to leave areas following a severe shock than people in a typical county.

Rising inequality

Despite the progress in preparing for natural disasters, our research suggests the poor will face growing exposure to natural disaster activity. Our research suggests that the rich may have the resources to move away from areas facing natural disasters, leaving behind a population that is disproportionately poor.

During a time of increased concern about income inequality and climate change risk, natural disaster exposure risk could become another cause of rising quality of life inequality between the rich and the poor. Our study suggests that areas that do not adapt to natural disaster risk will become poorer over time, as well-to-do residents move away.

How Did Memorial Day Go From a Confederate Holiday to an All-American Celebration? There were many in both parts of the U.S. who had no interest in conciliation. by Richard Gardiner

In the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country.

The holiday was Memorial Day, an annual commemoration was born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868. It is a holiday in which the nation honors its military dead.

Gen. John A. Logan, who headed the largest Union veterans’ fraternity at that time, the Grand Army of the Republic, is usually credited as being the originator of the holiday.

Yet when General Logan established the holiday, he acknowledged its genesis among the Union’s former enemies, saying, “It was not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South.”

I’m a scholar who has written – with co-author Daniel Bellware – a history of Memorial Day. Cities and towns across America have for more than a century claimed to be the holiday’s birthplace, but we have sifted through the myths and half-truths and uncovered the authentic story of how this holiday came into being.

Generous acts bore fruit

During 1866, the first year of this annual observance in the South, a feature of the holiday emerged that made awareness, admiration and eventually imitation of it spread quickly to the North.

During the inaugural Memorial Day observances which were conceived in Columbus, Georgia, many Southern participants – especially women – decorated graves of Confederate soldiers as well as, unexpectedly, those of their former enemies who fought for the Union.

Shortly after those first Memorial Day observances all across the South, newspaper coverage in the North was highly favorable to the ex-Confederates.

“The action of the ladies on this occasion, in burying whatever animosities or ill-feeling may have been engendered in the late war towards those who fought against them, is worthy of all praise and commendation,” wrote one paper.

On May 9, 1866, the Cleveland Daily Leader lauded the Southern women during their first Memorial Day.

“The act was as beautiful as it was unselfish, and will be appreciated in the North.”

The New York Commercial Advertiser, recognizing the magnanimous deeds of the women of Columbus, Georgia, echoed the sentiment. “Let this incident, touching and beautiful as it is, impart to our Washington authorities a lesson in conciliation.”

Power of a poem

To be sure, this sentiment was not unanimous. There were many in both parts of the U.S. who had no interest in conciliation.

But as a result of one of these news reports, Francis Miles Finch, a Northern judge, academic and poet, wrote a poem titled “The Blue and the Gray.” Finch’s poem quickly became part of the American literary canon. He explained what inspired him to write it:

“It struck me that the South was holding out a friendly hand, and that it was our duty, not only as conquerors, but as men and their fellow citizens of the nation, to grasp it.”

 Finch’s poem seemed to extend a full pardon to the South: “They banish our anger forever when they laurel the graves of our dead” was one of the lines.

Almost immediately, the poem circulated across America in books, magazines and newspapers. By the end of the 19th century, school children everywhere were required to memorize Finch’s poem. The ubiquitous publication of Finch’s rhyme meant that by the end of 1867, the southern Memorial Day holiday was a familiar phenomenon throughout the entire, and recently reunited, country.

General Logan was aware of the forgiving sentiments of people like Finch. When Logan’s order establishing Memorial Day was published in various newspapers in May 1868, Finch’s poem was sometimes appended to the order.

‘The blue and the grey’

It was not long before Northerners decided that they would not only adopt the Southern custom of Memorial Day, but also the Southern custom of “burying the hatchet.” A group of Union veterans explained their intentions in a letter to the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph on May 28, 1869:

“Wishing to bury forever the harsh feelings engendered by the war, Post 19 has decided not to pass by the graves of the Confederates sleeping in our lines, but divide each year between the blue and the grey the first floral offerings of a common country. We have no powerless foes. Post 19 thinks of the Southern dead only as brave men.”

Other reports of reciprocal magnanimity circulated in the North, including the gesture of a 10-year-old who made a wreath of flowers and sent it to the overseer of the holiday, Colonel Leaming, in Lafayette, Indiana, with the following note attached, published in The New Hampshire Patriot on July 15, 1868:

“Will you please put this wreath upon some rebel soldier’s grave? My dear papa is buried at Andersonville, (Georgia) and perhaps some little girl will be kind enough to put a few flowers upon his grave.”

President Abraham Lincoln’s wish that there be “malice toward none” and “charity for all” was visible in the magnanimous actions of participants on both sides, who extended an olive branch during the Memorial Day observances in those first three years.

Although not known by many today, the early evolution of the Memorial Day holiday was a manifestation of Lincoln’s hope for reconciliation between North and South. 

4 Ways COVID-19 Has Exposed Gaps in the US Social Safety Net We took a deeper look at how difficult it might be for people to navigate their way through the U.S.' patchwork of social safety net measures as they try to stay afloat during the pandemic and economic downturn. by Paul Shafer

The United States is experiencing its steepest economic slide in modern history. Tens of millions of Americans have filed new unemployment claims as the coronavirus shutters businesses and forces companies to lay off staff. 

People need support to help them through the crisis in a few key ways – cash to meet immediate financial needs, health care to cover them should they become ill and housing even if they can’t make rent. Despite federal stimulus efforts north of US$2 trillion – so far – it is likely that some of those currently being affected will fall through the cracks.

As a scholar who studies how people enroll in public programs, I and my colleague Cecille Joan Avila, who researches social programs related to women’s health, have seen how well-intentioned policies can sometimes fail those they are supposed to help.

We took a deeper look at how difficult it might be for people to navigate their way through the U.S.‘s patchwork of social safety net measures as they try to stay afloat during the pandemic and economic downturn. Here are four gaps that we found:

1. Delays, exemptions to financial aid

Congress passed stimulus measures that are providing some Americans with a one-time check of up to $1,200 per adult and $500 per dependent child along with a temporary boost in unemployment benefits. Many received their stimulus through direct deposit, but millions of low-income Americans experienced problems and delays receiving payment. As many as 20 million may have had stimulus deposits go to tax preparers who take a fee out of refunds because clients are too poor to pay for tax prep up front. There are a variety of other reasons for delays: if individuals haven’t filed their 2019 tax returns yet, if their address has changed recently or if they don’t have a bank account.

Not everyone benefits from stimulus measures. Young adults over the age of 17 who can be claimed as a dependent will not receive checks, nor will people who jointly filed their taxes with immigrant spouses who are not citizens, even if they are here legally.

Workers in more than half of states will receive, on average, more in unemployment benefits than their normal salaries. But there are challenges to receiving unemployment benefits too, as the rules vary from state to state and labor agencies are struggling to keep up with unemployment filings. There are also thresholds for minimum earnings to qualify and limits on how long a person can collect unemployment.

2. Free testing but costly treatment?

Congress mandated that private insurance cover testing at no cost, but not treatment. Infected? Get your deductible ready. Many will count on Medicaid, which typically covers medical bills retroactively for three months prior to application if you were eligible, but people in states that have broad restrictions on retroactive coverage could be left holding the bag. And anyone in the process of getting their Medicaid coverage renewed might be concerned, to say nothing of the nearly 30 million Americans uninsured before the crisis.

A $100 billion fund will help hospitals cover the cost of treating uninsured people affected by COVID-19. But the CARES Act was unspecific about how fast and to what areas the funds will be distributed, and what they can be used for. That needs to be figured out quickly, as treatment costs may be as high as $40,000 per patient.

And none of this funding even addresses those who develop long-term complications that require ongoing care.

3. Unemployed and uninsured

Losing employment and health insurance coverage counts as a qualifying event to sign up for health insurance through HealthCare.gov or a state-based marketplace, but that assumes people know that they can. The Trump administration has avoided any broad reopening of enrollment, but several states have done so. Laid-off employees may have the option of extending their former employer’s health insurance through COBRA, but this tends to be more expensive and unsustainable.

Two recent studies project that nearly 20 million Americans may face disruptions in employer-based health insurance, with as many as 11 million becoming uninsured. For those newly uninsured, living in a Medicaid expansion state like New York or California might mean you are OK. But even before the pandemic, there were already an estimated 2.3 million people living in nonexpansion states like Texas or Florida who fell into the coverage gap – making too much money to qualify for Medicaid and yet not enough to afford coverage.

4. Safe from eviction, but for how long?

Stay-at-home orders have been seen as key in slowing the spread, but rely on the false assumption that everyone has access to safe and stable housing. Some people looking for affordable housing placements in March and April found themselves in limbo, with progress on paperwork suddenly stalled. For those with housing, unpaid rent was up 50% in April over March. Many large cities and states have temporarily halted evictions and a federal eviction ban covers about a quarter of rental housing. But this is only for nonpayment, leaving a loophole for landlords to continue pursuing eviction for other reasons. And that one-time stimulus check won’t even cover the median monthly rent in a number of states, especially in parts of California and the New York City metro area. So what happens when the check has been spent and the eviction ban is lifted?

A solution

What if these safety net programs were better integrated? Imagine if filing for unemployment triggered a next step – either presenting a series of subsidized health plan options through HealthCare.gov or auto-enrolling those eligible in Medicaid. It would potentially alleviate administrative burden and address gaps in information. States could use a mechanism like Express Lane Eligibility, which allows officials to use information provided from one state agency to make eligibility determinations for Medicaid, though there are good reasons – mostly solvable – why many states haven’t yet.

The U.S.’s social safety net is more a loose patchwork unprepared to handle a crisis like the pandemic, relying on disconnected public programs and old technology. The federal government is relying on short-term measures directed to those affected by the crisis, but we believe it does little to address the plight of those who were already economically vulnerable and those who will be long after this pandemic.

Disaster preparedness isn’t just the National Guard, personal protective equipment and bottled water anymore. This pandemic has shown that it is now also the ability to keep people economically afloat through a potentially prolonged and sudden financial crisis.