We're about to have a conversation about the effects of COVID that has very little to do with vaccines or viral loads.

Because beyond all the ways the once novel infection can ravage individual human bodies,

it has also caused serious damage to the social fabric of this country,

to our sense that we have any obligation to other people,

and the ones who have suffered most because of this are the ones who had the least to begin with.

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. My guest understands this

intellectually from the reporting she's done on the subject, but she also feels it emotionally.

The week she was supposed to be married, her family gathered instead to cremate her grandfather,

who died of complications of the virus in September of 2020.

And like large numbers of Americans who did not survive their infections, her grandfather's

socioeconomic status was almost surely a contributor.

Sarah Jones is senior writer for New York Magazine and author of the book Disposable,

America's Contempt for the Underclass. Sarah, welcome to think.

Thank you so much for having me. This book explores a concept you call social murder. Can you

explain what that term means? Definitely. So the idea of social murder originates with a thinker

called Friedrich Engelsels who was writing in the

19th century and he was working on a treatise about the condition of the working class in

England and in the process of his own reporting and research on the subject he came to the

conclusion that there was a concept called social murder,

that society was organized in such a way that it was forcing people into positions where they

were subject to preventable on unnecessary death.

And this was murder as much as if someone had pulled a trigger.

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