Getting sick in the United States, along with pretty much everything else under the general description of, well, "activity," takes an ever-increasing amount of private labor, especially if you are low income.
Our conception of illness carries with it images of lying in bed, sleeping, drinking chicken soup, consuming media, etc. All of these things do happen in the course of illness, but within the course of the coronavirus in particular is an extensive amount of legwork in various forms: one is researching symptoms, indications, prognoses, and best practices, both in terms of self care and self-isolation and the way in which one is relating to others and the environment.
In the United States this has to be done because of the contradictory, unreliable, vague, and oftentimes obfuscating official accounts and directives. Work has to be put in to sift through sources and the streams of evaluations of those sources, and work has to be put in to wade through bullshit, horseshit, and all the other kinds of shit.
One is calling medical centers, social services institutions, and insurance companies trying to suss out just what one's obligations and entitlements are, and talking to service reps and filling out forms after having labored through the communication and distribution networks themselves which are themselves designed to discourage and filter people out and offload the labor onto the individual who is annoyingly in need.
And after this work is put in, still the minimum amount of public support is doled out, and one is working under pressure in the private home, making teas, acquiring groceries, researching and putting together remedies, and all of the rest to attempt to stay alive. And this is coupled with maintaining work relationships and maintaining one's place in the labor sphere, and putting in work to ensure the steady flow of financial support and the meeting of economic obligations like rent, insurance, utilities, and supplies, some of which are only temporarily lifted or ameliorated with measly stimulus payments.
This is a buildup of private labor and effort that is a direct consequence of the disintegration of the public sphere and the abdication of responsibility of the ruling class in maintaining that sphere, which, let's be clear, implies specifically the disintegration of entitlement and public accommodating labor, while obligations and public requirements on the other hand are welded firmly in place, and indeed, augmented in their requirements on the individual.
Over generations there is a steady yet imperceptible change, in which each successive generation accepts a lower standard of living and a greater amount of maintenance labor, much like a bad diet over one's lifetime steadily puts a greater load on one's system as damage accumulates. Eventually one is huffing and puffing and losing one's breath with only a vague sense that something is amiss (at least in terms of the average perception).
All of this until a link breaks and all of the struggling processes grind to a halt.
