Book Review: ‘Disposable’ a journey through the inequities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic

Five years after COVID-19 first emerged, the United States is still grappling with the aftereffects of the pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide. They include the gaps in the nation’s health care system and social safety net that were highlighted by the pandemic’s effects.

Those inequities are the focus of journalist Sarah Jones’ “Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass,” a deeply reported, enlightening and empathetic look at the populations that were hit hardest by the pandemic.

Jones takes readers on a journey to illustrate the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on lower-income, Black and Latino communities, showing how the consequences spanned from nursing home residents to front-line health workers.

“Like all major disasters, the pandemic is a moment of revelation,” Jones writes. “Through it, we see America as it is, and not as we would like it to be.”

Jones underscores her point with staggering details and statistics about how unaddressed gaps in the health care, worker safety and other systems compounded the pandemic’s toll.

But the most powerful parts of her book are the personal stories she gathers from families affected by COVID-19. They include Jones’ own family and her grandfather’s death from COVID.

Jones offers at least some hope that while the gaps in health care and other needs remain after the pandemic, that chronicling them the way she has creates a memorial in itself that could spur action.

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