Writing Assignment You have been provided with a topic below. Your assignment is to write a 3-5-page paper. Include your thoughts on the topic below and use the text and three supporting resources, such as journal articles, news articles or other academic resources to support your thoughts. Resources that are not academic, such as Wikipedia, will not be accepted. You are expected to have a cover page, title page, abstract, in-text citations, and a reference list of citations from your resources on the last page (see APA Format Cheat Sheet under your assignment tab). Topic: In Chapter 1 of the text: the sinking of the Titanic, the authors discuss that when the Titanic went down in 1912, all were endangered, but some more than others. Most of the third-class passengers perished, but relatively few of the first-class passengers lost their lives due to socio-economic and class issues. The COVID-19 pandemic, like the Titanic 1912 Gilded Age tragedy, strikes in an era of growing inequality. And, like that tragedy, but on a grander scale, it has forced into view social disparities with terrible consequences. Minorities and lower-income Americans have proven especially vulnerable to the disease and to the economic collapse that has accompanied it. They are over-represented among those who have died and those who have lost their jobs. The reasons are not hard to find. These populations are especially at risk due to underlying health conditions and poor access to medical care. They are likely to live in crowded housing where the virus can easily pass among family members. Many were employed in sectors that shut down in the early days of the pandemic (restaurants, hotels, hair salons). Others had little choice but to continue working at jobs that maximize their exposure to infected customers or coworkers (bus drivers, cashiers, deliverers, nursing home staff, meat plant workers). The consequences of the disease were most often fatal for older people, but especially for the minority and low-income elderly. In the initial weeks of the pandemic, Covid-19 appeared to be an equalizer: CEOs, senators, and movie stars were among the infected, along with the people you might see on the bus. In the hospitals, physicians, nurses, and janitors were all at risk.
But the virus was never an equal-opportunity menace. “Every time I see a commercial on TV that says we are all in this together,” an angry nurse told the New York Times, “my blood boils. We are not in this together! The upper-middle class is fine. But two-thirds of this country is going down the drain” (May 24). Of course, the people of the privileged third are typically able to work from home, protecting both their health and their incomes. They retain good medical coverage. The value of the stocks in their retirement accounts dipped deeply in March but largely recovered a few weeks later. Many affluent urban families took advantage of the opportunity to retreat to second homes in the country or at the seashore, where it was easier to avoid contact with carriers of Covid-19. After reading this and experiencing the pandemic first hand, what are your thoughts about the disparities that occurred? Again, share your thoughts and support these thoughts from the literature.
