This moment calls for global cooperation and solidarity, and on that front, Cuba provides a lesson for us all. We can start by demanding an end to US sanctions that stop Cuba from getting access to the resources it needs to fight this deadly pandemic, both for their own population and for the global beneficiaries of Cuban medical internationalism.

Mel Watkins, who passed on April 2, was a wonderful human being, a friend and mentor, the leading left economist of his or indeed any generation in Canada, and, not least, a committed democratic socialist and political activist. He will be greatly missed. But his life leaves behind an inspiring legacy.

In 2020, Joe Biden finds himself as the pick of the Democratic establishment for the US presidential primaries. Their case for Biden is a “return to normalcy” as the strategy to beat Donald Trump in the general election. In Branko Marcetic’s Yesterday’s Man, however, there is a strong case to be made against the 77-year-old’s presidential candidacy by looking into Biden’s legislative record.

Workers ought to be made whole to mitigate their losses stemming from the current economic crisis. Systemic delays, inadequate resources, unpreparedness, crippled medical resources and, in some cases, outright indifference to the fate of hundreds of thousands of working people has compelled many to work in close proximity without adequate protection.

The marriage of neoliberalism and the medical industrial complex has had disastrous results in Canada, even without the presence of a pandemic. This toxic relationship has led to decades of healthcare cuts, privatization of services, and warehousing of disabled and elder populations. Now, COVID-19 is exacerbating an already broken system.

The current self-serving and anti-social posture taken by capitalists reveals they are content to let people suffer and die if this pandemic allows them to maintain or augment their wealth. The stakes could not be higher. Our response has the potential to make this horrific pandemic a crucial moment, or even the basis for a revolutionary transformation in social relations.

Pushing people into echo-chambers of their own solipsism is merely an extension of the way that many people live in both real and virtual worlds. In this sense, we are already socially distant–the more pressing concern is understanding the broader impacts of forced spatial distancing, especially upon society’s most vulnerable.

The influenza outbreak experienced in Winnipeg over a century ago, described in detail in Esyllt Jones’ Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg, echoes many of today’s crises caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, but it also offers a rough guide for what may come next.

Governments around the world are comparing the resolution of the COVID-19 crisis to a war. After all, it was the New Deal and World War II that launched an era of globally unprecedented economic growth, prosperity and the swelling of the middle class. Let us use this ‘war on COVID-19’ and the Green New Deal to learn from our past mistakes, and prepare us for a socially and environmentally just future.

The race to finger the animal source of COVID-19 is on. The virus’s animal origin is a critical mystery to solve. But speculation about which wild creature originally harbored the virus obscures a more fundamental source of our growing vulnerability to pandemics: the accelerating pace of habitat loss.