Reality divides itself neatly, or so we in the West like to think. There are things fixed in nature, like gravity, or the certainty of a sunrise. Then there are things we can change, like minds. Social behavior and cultural norms are pliable—ideas about beauty, for instance, or the age at which a child becomes an adult. Whereas biology is more of a given, in that bodies require at least some accommodation. Reality comes in two forms, more or less: immovable and movable. The material world and the socially constructed one. Hard and soft.

Like any plague, the COVID-19 pandemic shattered this neat divide, even as we tried to uphold it. We spoke until our heads spun of COVID-19 as a cold, hard fact. The virus doesn't know, or care, who you are. The virus puts a “hard limit” on cultural fancies, as one commentator put it. It doesn't speak social; it exists on another plane.

A virus transmits on a frequency more formidable, we said—communicability instead of communication, physical rather than social. Hard, not soft.

Sure enough, COVID-19 blew right past the human-made lines some hoped might stop it. National boundaries were no match. Privileged people, everywhere, had to face their sudden lack of immunity to the ills of others. I’m talking about those of us in places spared from prior contagions, such as SARS or Ebola, by the buffers of physical distance and resource abundance. Those of us insulated in dominant groups, oblivious to pandemics that ravaged our marginalized neighbors, like HIV/ AIDS. Those of us who count on the prejudice of plagues. The ‘virus doesn't discriminate’ mantra was meant for us. We are the ones who had to pinch ourselves that this was happening.

The virus did discriminate, though. As we know by now, COVID-19 tore readily and fatally through some communities more than others, just like our social arrangements ‘told it to.’ Sure, the virus didn't exactly ‘see’ race and class. It traveled their well-worn paths of differential protection and risk. It exploited the bodily effects of living in habitats of privilege and disadvantage. It took advantage of comorbidities accumulated over years of hard labor and poor health care. It piled on to these biological manifestations of social and economic inequity and, conversely, respected some physical markers of privilege.