The United States is unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic given that many workers throughout the economy will have financial difficulty in following the CDC's recommendations to stay home and seek medical care if they think they've become infected. Millions of U.S. workers and their families don't have access to health insurance, and only 30% of the lowest paid workers have the ability to earn paid sick days—workers who typically have lots of contact with the public and aren't able to work from home.
There are deficiencies in paid sick days coverage per sector, particularly among those workers with a lot of public exposure. The figure below displays access to paid sick leave by sector. Information and financial activities have the highest rates of coverage at 95% and 91%, respectively. Education and health services, manufacturing, and professional and business services have lower rates of coverage, but still maintain at least three-quarters of workers with access. Trade, transportation, and utilities comes in at 72%, but there are significant differences within that sector ranging from utilities at 95% down to retail trade at 64% (not shown). Over half of private-sector workers in leisure and hospitality do not have access to paid sick days. Within that sector, 55% of workers in accommodation and food services do not have access to paid sick days (not shown).
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Of the public health concerns in the workforce related to COVID-19, two loom large: those who work with the elderly because of how dangerous the virus is for that population and those who work with food because of the transmission of illness. Research shows that more paid sick days is related to reduced flu rates. There is no reason to believe contagion of COVID-19 will be any different. When over half of workers in food services and related occupations do not have access to paid sick days, the illness may spread more quickly.
What exacerbates the lack of paid sick days among these workers is that their jobs are already not easily transferable to working from home. On average, about 29% of all workers can work from home. And, not surprisingly, workers in sectors where they are more likely to have paid sick days are also more likely to be able to work from home. Over 50% of workers in information, financial activities, and professional and business services can work from home. However, only about 9% of workers in leisure and hospitality are able to work from home.
Many of the 73% of workers with access to paid sick days will not have enough days banked to be able to take off for the course of the illness to take care of themselves or a family member. COVID-19's incubation period could be as long as 14 days, and little is known about how long it could take to recover once symptoms take hold. The figure below displays the amount of paid sick days workers have access to at different lengths of service. Paid sick days increase by years of service, but even after twenty years, only 25% of private-sector workers are offered at least 10 days of paid sick days a year.
The small sliver of green shows that a very small share (only about 4%) of workers—regardless of their length of service—have access to more than 14 paid sick days. That's just under three weeks for a five-day-a-week worker, assuming they have that many days at their disposal at the time when illness strikes. The vast majority of workers, over three-quarters of all workers, have nine days or less of paid sick time. This clearly shows that even among workers with access to some amount of paid sick days, the amounts are likely to be insufficient.
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NEW YORK – As an educator, I'm always looking for "teachable moments" – current events that illustrate and reinforce the principles on which I've been lecturing. And there is nothing like a pandemic to focus attention on what really matters.
The COVID-19 crisis is rich in lessons, especially for the United States. One takeaway is that viruses do not carry passports; in fact, they don't observe national borders – or nationalist rhetoric – at all. In our closely integrated world, a contagious disease originating in one country can and will go global.
The spread of diseases is one negative side effect of globalization. Whenever such cross-border crises emerge, they demand a global, cooperative response, as in the case of climate change. Like viruses, greenhouse-gas emissions are wreaking havoc and imposing massive costs on countries around the world through the damage caused by global warming and the associated extreme weather events.
No US presidential administration has done more to undermine global cooperation and the role of government than that of Donald Trump. And yet, when we face a crisis like an epidemic or a hurricane, we turn to government, because we know that such events demand collective action. We cannot go it alone, nor can we rely on the private sector. All too often, profit-maximizing firms will see crises as opportunities for price gouging, as is already evident in the rising prices of face masks.
Unfortunately, since US President Ronald Reagan's administration, the mantra in the US has been that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Taking that nostrum seriously is a dead-end road, but Trump has traveled further down it than any other US political leader in memory.
At the center of the US response to the COVID-19 crisis is one of the country's most venerable scientific institutions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has traditionally been staffed with committed, knowledgeable, highly trained professionals. To Trump, the ultimate know-nothing politician, such experts pose a serious problem, because they will contradict him whenever he tries to make up facts to serve his own interests.
Faith may help us cope with the deaths caused by an epidemic, but it is no substitute for medical and scientific knowledge. Willpower and prayers were useless in containing the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Fortunately, humanity has made remarkable scientific advances since then. When the COVID-19 strain appeared, scientists were quickly able to analyze it, test for it, trace its mutations, and begin work on a vaccine. While there is still much more to learn about the new coronavirus and its effects on humans, without science, we would be completely at its mercy, and panic would have already ensued.
Scientific research requires resources. But most of the biggest scientific advances in recent years have cost peanuts compared to the largesse bestowed on our richest corporations by Trump and congressional Republicans' 2017 tax cuts. Indeed, our investments in science also pale in comparison to the latest epidemic's likely costs to the economy, not to mention lost stock-market value.
Nonetheless, as Linda Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School points out, the Trump administration has proposed cuts to the CDC's funding year after year (10% in 2018, 19% in 2019). At the start of this year, Trump, demonstrating the worst timing imaginable, called for a 20% cut in spending on programs to fight emerging infectious and zoonotic diseases (that is, pathogens like coronaviruses, which originate in animals and jump to humans). And in 2018, he eliminated the National Security Council's global health security and biodefense directorate.
Not surprisingly, the administration has proved ill-equipped to deal with the outbreak. Though COVID-19 reached epidemic proportions weeks ago, the US has suffered from insufficient testing capacity (even compared to a much poorer country like South Korea) and inadequate procedures and protocols for handling potentially exposed travelers returning from abroad.
This subpar response should serve as yet another reminder that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But Trump's all-purpose panacea for any economic threat is simply to demand more monetary-policy easing and tax cuts (typically for the rich), as if cutting interest rates is all that is needed to generate another stock-market boom.
This quack treatment is even less likely to work now than it did in 2017, when the tax cuts created a short-term economic sugar high that had already faded as we entered 2020. With many US firms facing supply-chain disruptions, it is hard to imagine that they would suddenly decide to undertake major investments just because interest rates were cut by 50 basis points (assuming commercial banks even pass on the cuts in the first place).
Worse, the epidemic's full costs to the US may be yet to come, particularly if the virus isn't contained. In the absence of paid sick leave, many infected workers already struggling to make ends meet will show up to work anyway. And in the absence of adequate health insurance, they will be reluctant to seek tests and treatment, lest they be hit with massive medical bills. The number of vulnerable Americans should not be underestimated. Under Trump, morbidity and mortality rates are rising, and some 37 million people regularly confront hunger.
All these risks will grow if panic ensues. Preventing that requires trust, particularly in those tasked with informing the public and responding to the crisis. But Trump and the Republican Party have been sowing distrust toward government, science, and the media for years, while giving free rein to profit-hungry social-media giants like Facebook, which knowingly allows its platform to be used to spread disinformation. The perverse irony is that the Trump administration's ham-handed response will undermine trust in government even further.
The US should have started preparing for the risks of pandemics and climate change years ago. Only governance based on sound science can protect us from such crises. Now that both threats are bearing down on us, one hopes that there are still enough dedicated bureaucrats and scientists left in the government to protect us from Trump and his incompetent cronies.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is University Professor at Columbia University and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute. His most recent book is People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.