There are a few challenges in talking about pandemic strategy in the US. First, the media hasn't given us the debate we deserve about which strategy we should use in 2021. Second, neither of our two major parties are talking about it. Third, b/c of #1 and #2 it can sound strange.

If you want to talk about changing our pandemic strategy in the US, and trying something other than the failed strategy that Trump started last year, you can do it in ways people will understand.

Start by talking about inequality in the United States.

The US has massive inequality. Even before the pandemic huge numbers of poor/low-income people struggling to stay housed and fed.

Shocking for the world's wealthiest country.

This inequality is exactly why our pandemic strategy hasn't worked. People can't afford to stay home.

Even now experts continue to tell people to keep to their bubbles and stay home, but the only Americans who can afford to do this are mostly white and wealthy.

The poor and low income can't.

So the pandemic disproportionately threatens and kills people already marginalized.

Here's why our pandemic strategy hasn't worked in the US.

We have tried to suppress and mitigate the spread and reduce deaths by asking people to stay home if they can. But we haven't provided people with any support to make that possible. So most people can't stay home.

This is exactly the reason many people have called for monthly $2000 checks to everyone.

Including @AOC, @IlhanMN, @AyannaPressley, @CoriBush, @BernieSanders, @EdMarkey, @KamalaHarris.

By calling for these checks, they are implicitly calling for a change in pandemic strategy.

To make it so people *can* stay home and protect themselves and others, we have to give them the *means* to do it.

That means really banning all evictions and foreclosures, sending people money, closing non-essential business and supporting them, and stopping spread of COVID.

In the US we've used a strategy of suppressing and mitigating the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.

But that strategy has relied on asking people to do it while not giving them what they need in order to actually do what we're asking.

That's literally bonkers.