Maybe this time we could actually try?

The thing to know about the US response to COVID in 2020 is that we did not even try to contain it. The leadership in the Congress and in the Trump Administration were more concerned about ensuring that the bosses and ownership classes in the country profited from the pandemic than they were interested in stopping it. Because of their utter and willful failure to put forth a national plan that would for pay people to stay home and prop up state and local governments during the lockdown, every locality was left to make its own policy dictated by local wealth and power.

Which is why, even in cities like New Orleans where the political leadership has been relatively serious about the threat, the lack of help from the feds has left that - to put it charitably - unfocused leadership vulnerable to pressure from the local bosses and ownership classes. And so even the local COVID restrictions were embedded with favoritism toward local power centers. Tourism business owners were allowed to expose their workers and customers to danger. Charter school boards were allowed to force staff and students into unsafe classrooms. Gayle Benson was allowed to gather crowds in the Superdome. 

We've seen the results of all of that and they have not been good. So, given this experience, what happens when these new COVID variants begin to proliferate? It says here we will have to do "something dramatic."

“I’m very, very concerned that we’ve now gone from a virus that we could control to a virus that we really can’t, unless we do something very dramatic,” said Kristian Andersen, an infectious diseases expert at Scripps Research Institute.

A spike in infections — on top of the existing caseloads — could force hospital leaders to consider how to surge capacity, staff, and resources — and weigh what happens if they have too many patients to care for. It could force schools to close again or delay plans to reopen. The variants are also ramping up the pressure on the country’s sputtering vaccine rollout, to try to protect more people and snuff out transmission before the variants become dominant

Are we prepared to tighten down further? The promise of the vaccine rollout plus general 2020 fatigue strongly suggests we are not. But, as we saw this week, the vaccines aren't quite rolling out as quickly as we had hoped.  So the critical matter now, if we want to handle this correctly,  is that we don't botch the federal relief effort a second time. Unfortunately it looks like we are well on the way to botching it a second time.

Biden is seeking to garner 10 Republican votes for the plan and approve it through "regular order," the usual path for legislation. But it's already running into early Republican opposition ranging from Rep. Kevin Brady, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, to Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee.

"Republicans have made it clear they're not going to go for something of this size," Jim Manley, a former senior Democratic aide and now a political strategist, told Insider. "I can't imagine Republicans going for a package like this that includes minimum wage."

Republicans, of course, do not care who lives and who dies as long as the bosses and owners make out okay. And Joe Biden obviously doesn't care about anything as much as he cares about making Republicans happy.  So here we go again. A whole new chance to get it right and a whole new chance to blow it. Is it too much to ask that we try at least?