2/28 People have lunch at the Penguin Eat Shabu hotpot restaurant after it reopened in Bangkok, Thailand, May 8. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
3/28 A yellow stripe painted in the middle of a pedestrian street to help people comply with social distance guidelines in Aalborg, Denmark, May 4. Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix/via REUTERS
4/28 A restaurant tests servers providing drinks and food to models pretending to be guests in safe 'quarantine greenhouses' in which clients can dine in Amsterdam, May 5. REUTERS/Eva Plevier
7/28 Circles on the ground indicating where to sit and stand in a tramway in Nice, France, May 6. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard
25/28 Plastic circles on the ground indicating where to stand at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris, France, May 5. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Thousands are dying each week, the economy is cratering, and the president is at a total loss.
6:30 AM ET David A. Graham Staff writer at The Atlantic
It’s been 111 days since the first reported case of the coronavirus in the United States. It’s been 57 days since President Trump issued social-distancing guidelines, and 12 days since they expired.
Yet the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.
Echoing his breezy language in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump has in recent days returned to a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own accord, without a major government response.
“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests: This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Trump said Friday. “It’s going to go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”
He added: “They say it’s going to go—that doesn’t mean this year—doesn’t mean it’s going to be gone, frankly, by fall or after the fall. But eventually it’s going to go away. The question is, will we need a vaccine? At some point it’s going to probably go away by itself. If we had a vaccine that would be very helpful.”
Read: There’s one big reason the economy can’t reopen
As for the cratering economy, which on Friday produced the worst jobs numbers on record, Trump shrugged. “We’re in no rush, we’re in no rush,” he said.
The president’s shiftlessness in the face of the greatest crisis of his presidency, and the greatest political threat during it, is confounding. Of course, Trump has faced mortal political threats before; less than five months ago, he became only the third president in American history to be impeached. He’s shown a remarkable ability to survive damaging situations. And his plans have often been derided by skeptics as unwise, unrealistic, or simplistic. This situation is different, though: Grappling with a multifront crisis, Trump seems to have no plan at all.
Let’s begin with efforts against the illness itself. The 45 days during which Trump recommended social distancing were meant to prevent hospitals from being swamped with patients, and give the government time to devise more effective measures. But when that period ended at the end of April, Trump simply let his recommendations lapse, opting not to extend them in favor of vague calls for reopening the economy.
Those six weeks didn’t actually buy the country much time, because the White House wasted them. With New York City removed from the numbers, the national curve hasn’t flattened at all. States continue to fend for themselves on tests and personal protective equipment. Trump held a White House event yesterday to tout growth in testing in the U.S., but the president’s rhetoric was misleading. The U.S. does not, as he claimed, lead the world in testing, on a per capita basis. He also continues to compare the U.S. rate favorably to South Korea’s, eliding that South Korea was able to control its outbreak sooner by testing faster, and thereby reducing its need for testing.
As my colleague Robinson Meyer has reported, based on figures in the COVID Tracking Project, which is housed at The Atlantic, the U.S. has increased testing but still needs to expand it dramatically to match expert recommendations. “To an almost astonishing degree, the U.S. has no national plan for achieving this goal,” Meyer writes. “There is no effort at the federal level that has mustered anything like the funding, coordination, or real resources that experts across the political spectrum say is needed to safely reopen the country.”
One possible problem is that to muster the kind of government effort required to catch up, Trump might have to acknowledge that his various premature “Mission accomplished” announcements were grievously wrong. Instead, he has repeated them. “We have met the moment. And we have prevailed,” he said yesterday.
Having declared victory, Trump has begun calling for the country to reopen. He is correct to note that social distancing has knocked the American economy flat, but once again, he has no plan for how the reopening should occur. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did have a plan—but as the Associated Press first reported, the White House quashed it, telling the CDC its guidelines would never “see the light of day,” then lied about the process by which they were killed.
In any case, the White House push to reopen is based on a serious misunderstanding of the causes of the economic damage. In Trump’s imagination, which seems fired largely by the rowdy and often heavily armed—but highly unrepresentative—protesters gathering in state capitols, the problem is that governors and mayors have tyrannically consigned brave American “warriors” to their homes, when in fact the populace wants to be going about its business of haircuts and meals out and gym sessions as though there weren’t a deadly pandemic sweeping the country.
This is simply wrong. Commerce has ground to a halt because many Americans have decided they don’t want to risk infecting themselves or their family, regardless of whether there are formal government policies instructing or mandating that they stay home. As Jordan Weissmann (drawing on OpenTable data) points out, restaurants in states that have lifted stay-at-home orders have seen a tiny increase in attendance, but nowhere near enough to save those restaurants, much less float the economy. Nate Silver notes that states that have opened up aren’t seeing significantly more movement than those that haven’t. In short, Trump has placed most of his energy behind a vain hope, without any plan to accomplish reopening even if it were plausible. That has distracted his administration from any other efforts to boost the economy for what is likely to be a very long slog. The first three phases of stimulus have been, despite some complaints, positive measures, but they’re also clearly insufficient; Friday’s epochally bad jobs report came despite the billions Washington has already spent.
The government will need to spend much more to prop up the economy. This should be no problem, at least as a matter of politics. Democrats are already clamoring for more spending, and there’s little chance Republicans would balk en masse if Trump demanded a new bill. Some members of the administration acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. The White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett on Sunday forecast unemployment rates topping 20 percent, though he said he hoped policies so far had bought the White House time.
But others are inexplicably sanguine. Larry Kudlow, who incapably played an economist on television before being hired as the director of the National Economic Council, dismissed any need for new spending anytime soon. “We put all this money in, which is fine,” he said Friday at the White House. “It’s well worth it. Let’s see what happens. As we move into the reopening phase this month, maybe spill over to June, let’s have a look at it before we decide who, what, where, when.”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who worked well with Democrats on earlier phases of stimulus and has few clear ideological precommitments, would be a logical champion for more spending, but he appeared to remain fixated on reopening during a Sunday interview on Fox News.
Meanwhile, a faction of fiscal conservatives, reportedly led by new White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and budget chief Russ Vought, has suddenly discovered the concern for deficits that Republicans displayed throughout the Obama presidency and abandoned completely when Trump became president. They’ve returned to the theme at the worst possible time, both economically and politically. Austerity will only further crush the economy, and a cratering economy will make Trump’s reelection tougher.
Surveying the situation, Eric Levitz concludes that Republicans are simply “not cynical enough” to recognize the opportunity posed by stimulus spending: “For Republicans, some things are more important than winning elections—and, apparently, denying government assistance to desperate workers and their underfed children is one of them.”
That charge might be leveled at fiscal conservatives, as inconstant in their creed as they may be, but it is clearly not true of Trump. The president has no particular attachment to desperate workers or underfed children, as he has demonstrated throughout his life and now in his time as president. But he also has no attachment to fiscal conservatism either, nor will he be out-cynic’ed. For Trump, as for Vince Lombardi, winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.
Even with a clear imperative to spend, Democrats eager to work with him, and little need for wonky detail—all he has to do is sign a huge check—Trump hasn’t managed to commit to the most straightforward thing he can do to boost the economy and therefore his own reelection chances.
This isn’t because Trump is confident about November. White House reporters say the president is privately “glum and shell-shocked by his declining popularity.” His public behavior betrays the stress. He tweeted incessantly and manically on Sunday, then stormed out of a press conference yesterday after a jarring, testy exchange with reporters. He has begun a bizarre bombardment of his predecessor, Barack Obama, part of an unending search for villains. Trump is also deeply engaged in other efforts to boost his chances, including a campaign against voting by mail—a step many experts say is necessary to protect voters’ health, but which he has concluded (without much evidence) will help Democrats in November.
So much of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus was easily foretold. Experts had warned for years of a global pandemic. The president is obviously overmatched in his job. Trump badly botched the response to previous natural disasters, most prominently Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and pundits had predicted that he would stumble worse when faced with a larger test. His chaotic style of governance, lack of faith in his advisers, and inability to maintain his attention were all manifest before the coronavirus, and are on vivid display now. He has never been interested in the actual work of policy. None of this should have been a surprise to anyone paying attention for the past three years.
But through it all, Trump displayed a clear will to win, and a keen instinct for what it took to do that. This makes his failure to come up with even a semblance of a plan—good, bad, or unclear—a true mystery. Yesterday, the U.S. death toll crossed 81,000, a mark Trump had previously said it would never touch. More recently, he’s offered 100,000 as a likely figure. Will the president have a plan for the pandemic by then? At the moment, he’s in no rush.
"How South Korea Successfully Battled COVID-19 While the U.S. Didn’t "To link - How Kushner’s Volunteer Force Led a Fumbling Hunt for Medical Supplies""
They call it “kwarosa” — death from overwork. South Korea’s delivery workers say they are being sacrificed to keep the nation going during the pandemic.
By Carrington Clarke with photography by Mitch Woolnough
Foreign Correspondent Updated 26 Aug 2021, 1:37pm Published 26 Aug 2021, 5:02am
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tough for me. But it’s a matter of survival.
“My children won’t eat if I don’t earn.
“So I endure the hardship, endure not seeing them and work hard to earn money.
“Just like our fathers did.”
It was after 1:00am on a Sunday morning when a text message pinged on South Korean delivery driver Lee Seong-Wook’s phone. It was from a co-worker. “I’m still working,” the message said.
Even at that late hour, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. After all, Seong-Wook’s workmate Im Gwang-Soo had been clocking 90-hour weeks.
“We didn’t pay much attention [to the message],” Lee Seong-Wook says. “But what a turn of fate. In the morning there was a phone call — he’s collapsed.”
Lee Seong-Wook works around 90 hours a week as a delivery driver in Seoul, South Korea. Foreign Correspondent: Mitch Woolnough
Im Gwang-Soo, a 48-year-old father of two, had suffered a massive brain haemorrhage overnight and slipped into a coma. Doctors gave him a 5 per cent chance of survival.
Seong-Wook knows how easily it could have been him. Like Gwang-Soo, he’s in his 40s, separated with two young kids and working gruelling six-day weeks as a delivery driver in South Korea’s sprawling capital, Seoul.
“It wasn’t because he was weak,” says Seong-Wook. “We lived the same life for six months. Just the other day he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, it’s tough, isn’t it? Come on, we can do it!’ But he collapsed first.”
South Korea’s delivery workers were already overworked before the pandemic. But with COVID-19 cases soaring this year with the arrival of the Delta variant, a surge in online shopping has pushed many beyond breaking point. Unions say 21 delivery workers have died from overwork during the pandemic. - “It wasn’t because he was weak. We lived the same life for six months … he collapsed first.” - South Korea has the longest working hours in the developed world. In just a few generations, the country’s culture of hard work transformed a war-torn Japanese colony into the world’s 10th-largest economy.
Leaders promised the people that their sacrifices would pay off and their children would reap the rewards. But many Koreans say they’re still paying the cost. In one of the world’s most advanced economies, death by overwork is so common there’s a word for it: “kwarosa”.
South Korea's younger generations were promised hard work would bring rewards. Foreign Correspondent: Mitch Woolnough
With Gwang-Soo’s life hanging by a thread, Seong-Wook says this “vicious cycle” of overwork is to blame. It’s a cycle he hopes will soon be broken, before his own children come of working age.
Seong-Wook hasn’t held his daughters in six months. His unrelenting workload makes it almost impossible for now. On a dark street corner under the glow of neon lights, at the end of another 16-hour day, he swipes through videos of them.
“They are always on my mind, running towards me,” he says. “They are the reason I am doing this, trying my best.”
It’s 7:00am at a regional distribution centre and Seoul’s delivery drivers are about to face the first indignity of the working day.
Thousands of parcels are waiting here to be sorted, but the job won’t be done by warehouse staff.
Drivers like Seong-Wook are expected to sort and load the packages into their own vans.
It’s a job that can take hours. And the worst part — the drivers don’t get paid to do it.
Seong-Wook parks his truck next to a pile of boxes. The pressure is on to sort them quickly and accurately. Getting it wrong could mean painful doubling back during already long shifts. So the giant game of Tetris begins, with the last packages to be delivered going in first.
Delivery workers like Seong-Wook have kept South Korea’s economy moving during the pandemic. But as the public health restrictions ratchet up again, the pressure on them is mounting.
They’re spending even longer than usual sorting through the sheer volume of packages, delaying when they can start their deliveries. Many won’t finish the workday until midnight.
A problem with the conveyor belt has delayed Seong-Wook’s start time even further today. It’s already 2:00pm by the time he’s ready to make his first delivery.
“It took me seven hours,” he says. “Seven hours! I’ve finally arrived at my first house.”
More than 200 boxes are piled in the back of the truck. The overflow spills into the front seat. Seong-Wook only gets paid when he delivers a package, with each one earning him 800 won, or less than $1.
Seoul is a vast metropolis of 10 million people, and its gleaming skyline might be dominated by skyscrapers of glass and steel, but Seong-Wook’s delivery patch in Seongnam is an urban jungle of bricks and mortar.
Rows of tiny apartments line the steep streets, some perched six storeys above the pavement. The tight, twisted staircases seem purpose built to make life difficult for delivery drivers. Many of the buildings date back to South Korea’s post-war reconstruction period and were built without elevators. - “They are always on my mind, running towards me. They are the reason I am doing this, trying my best.” - “Hello. Delivery man,” he calls up to a woman on the stairs above. “Don’t come down! Please, don’t come down.” Potential exposure to COVID-19 is just one of the perils of the job.
Seong-Wook weaves the van through the narrow alleyways, dodging pedestrians and scooters. Some homes are simply inaccessible except on foot.
“You have to park the car in one spot and, using a trolley, walk more than a block for deliveries,” he says. “That’s the hardest part.”
There’s no time for a lunch break.
Undelivered packages can incur a late fee, sometimes worth many times what a driver earns for delivering the item.
So he moves quickly in the sweltering summer heat, beads of sweat forming on his brow, the unflinching blue sky mirrored in his sunglasses.
“If I cannot deliver all the items, I need to start very early the following morning,” he says.
“We are working in a terrible environment.”
It’s this “terrible” working environment that saw South Korean delivery drivers take to the streets in protest throughout 2021. Change has been promised but unions say it’s not coming fast enough.
In July, drivers for Korea Post staged an eight-day strike to protest against deaths from overwork, culminating in a rally in downtown Seoul. They received no income for the days of missed work and risked arrest under South Korea’s COVID health regulations.
“We are dying, that is why we are here,” postal delivery worker Huh Wonjea told Foreign Correspondent. “We don’t want to die, but they never want to hear our voice.”
Unions say 21 delivery workers have died from overwork during the pandemic. Foreign Correspondent: Mitch Woolnough
Back in January, logistics companies struck a deal with unions that would see more workers hired to help with sorting packages to take the pressure off the drivers. They also pledged to reduce working hours and stop deliveries after 9:00pm.
The deal was meant to come into effect in June but has been delayed until January 2022. Wonjea worries how many of his fellow drivers might die before then, especially as the pandemic puts more pressure on them daily.
“This is not right. This is not right,” Wonjea said. “They claim that the government successfully managed the defence of this pandemic situation, which might be true. Who were the ones who were sacrificed to support them? We are the ones … who were sacrificed to support the system.”
Seoul's sweltering afternoon heat is punishing for delivery drivers on long shifts. Foreign Correspondent: Mitch Woolnough
Seong-Wook is also fighting to overhaul South Korea’s deadly work culture. He’s a branch leader for the Delivery Workers Union and has been trying to organise a protest in honour of his colleague Gwang-Soo, who is still in a coma. - “Do you really think it’s OK to turn a blind eye or force someone to be sacrificed for your convenience?” - A recent visit to offer support to his friend’s distraught wife on behalf of the other drivers has further steeled him for action. He was crushed to learn she hadn’t had the heart to tell her young children what had happened to their father
“It’s for our sons and daughters,” says Seong-Wook. “No more casualties in the future. We want to have evenings off. We want to be good family men. That’s why we’re putting up a fight. But it hasn’t worked out so well so far because we’re up against big companies.”
One of the big companies linked to a death by overwork is e-commerce giant Coupang, often referred to as “South Korea’s Amazon”. In October last year, 27-year-old Jang Deok-Joon died of a heart attack after returning home from a night shift in one of Coupang’s fulfillment centres.
The company insisted his death was not work related but after a campaign by Deok-Joon’s parents, who travelled the country in a delivery truck bearing the slogan “Coupang Killed My Son!”, the South Korean government officially ruled it a death by overwork.
“There will be other victims like my son, there will be families like us,” Deok-Joon’s mother told Foreign Correspondent. “Do you really think it’s OK to turn a blind eye or force someone to be sacrificed for your convenience?”
As daylight fades over Seoul, the pile of boxes in Seong-Wook’s van seems to have hardly shrunk.
It’s now a race against a looming deadline that could cost him a big chunk of the day’s earnings.
In 2018, the South Korean government introduced a law to cap the work week at 52 hours, but most essential workers and subcontractors like delivery drivers were excluded from the cap. With the current workload, Seong-Wook says drivers have “no choice but to deliver through the night, even at dawn”.
Just before 9:00pm, after 14 hours on the job, he gets an automated message from his employer telling him to finish his deliveries. In a matter of minutes the company’s computer system will shut down, making it impossible to log packages as delivered that day.
“So what now?” Seong-Wook says. “I still have 66 undelivered items. They include food items. Am I meant to go home without delivering them? The company just sends this message to cover themselves.”
The workday continues long into the night for South Korean delivery drivers. Foreign Correspondent: Mitch Woolnough
He keeps working. It’ll take at least another hour to finish. Any boxes he delivers after 9:00pm will have to be marked as “delivered” tomorrow. For fresh food items, he’ll pay late fees.
“The late fee … is the price of the item. If this food item is 50,000 won, we’ll be charged 50,000 won,” he says. That’s a fine of roughly $60 for an item he’s paid less than $1 to deliver.
At 10:45pm, Seong-Wook finally calls it quits.
For a 16-hour day, he’s earned about $180, but that’s before paying tax, his petrol and phone bill, and any penalties for late deliveries.
He’ll rise early tomorrow to do it all again. “I’ll kick the bucket myself at this rate,” he says.
It’s been two months since Im Gwang-Soo fell into a coma. His life still hangs in the balance. After a recent operation, doctors have upgraded his prognosis to a 20 per cent chance of survival.
Lee Seong-Wook is keeping a close eye on his co-worker’s delivery van. Gwang-Soo’s truck was attracting parking tickets and complaints where it was left, so Seong-Wook has brought it home for safekeeping.
“I brought it to my house because I have some space for parking,” he says. “If he wakes up, he can drive his truck again. We’re waiting for a miracle.”
Seong-Wook is separated from his wife and lives alone in a small house close to the distribution centre. One of the other drivers recently caught COVID-19, fuelling Seong-Wook’s wife’s fear he could spread the virus to their daughters.
For now, keeping his distance is just another sacrifice he makes for them.
“Korean people work hard. But as people keep dying, questions are asked about why it’s happening and people start to realise it’s because of overwork.
“If our generation can’t change it, it’ll be passed down to the next generation, and then what we do for our children would be meaningless.”
Watch Foreign Correspondent’s ‘Dead On Arrival’ tonight at 8:00pm on ABC TV and iview, or streaming live on Facebook and YouTube.
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