Disposable: what Covid-19 did to those who couldn't afford to fight the virus

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/19/disposable-book-sarah-p-jones

Disposable: what Covid-19 did to those who couldn’t afford to fight the virus

Sarah Jones’s book includes personal history, including her grandfather – one of 1.2 million Americans the virus killed

Martin Pengelly in Washington
Wed 19 Feb 2025 07.00 EST

Sarah P Jones is a writer for New York magazine and now the author of Disposable, a study of “America’s Contempt for the Underclass”. Her new book describes in relentless detail what Covid-19 did to those who could not afford to fight the virus – or even to cope – in a country where access to healthcare depends on what you can pay.

The book is also a work of personal history: its subjects include Jones’s grandfather, one of more than 1.2 million Americans killed by the virus.

…
Disposable is about sickness but it is also about work. For New York magazine, and before that the New Republic, Jones “had covered a lot of labor stories over the years, and of course, Covid was, among many things, a huge labor story with dramatic implications for essential workers who were really putting their lives on the line just to keep America running”, she says. She had been covering some of the protests by Amazon workers against their working conditions at the pandemic’s peak when her grandfather contracted Covid and died.

…
She believes Covid played a significant role. “I think the pandemic did have this radical impact on on Americans, whether they lost somebody to Covid or they lost a job or not. I think it left people feeling very uncertain, very precarious, and they were looking for somebody who was going to address that.”

… more …

Disposable is published in the US on Tuesday

(Covid has gone down the memory hole. Glad she wrote this book.)

[txwhitedove]

1. Sounds fascinating. Several copies on order at my library system so put one on hold for myself.