In a moment of global coronavirus anxiety, when so many are feeling the stress and pressure of the pandemic’s impacts on our social, political, and economic realities, it is tempting to see COVID-19 as an equalizing force or, as Madonna called it from her bathtub, “the great equalizer.”

And while the virus itself may not care how rich, white, or otherwise privileged you are when it infects you, the pandemic is not actually an equalizer. Calling it one spotlights the rampant inequality already manifest in our society, as an equalizer only works if things are unequal. But the health and economic impacts of this plague will not even out those inequalities — it will sharpen and exacerbate them.

As Kandist Mallett wrote for Teen Vogue last week, the coronavirus is laying bare the failures of capitalism. As I wrote the week before, the pandemic is a reminder that the rich and powerful won’t save us. On the politics team here with my colleague, Allegra Kirkland, we have been overwhelmed with pitches about how COVID-19 is hitting the communities Teen Vogue has long tried to center in our political coverage: Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, disabled, and working-class and low-income people across the country and the world.

What we have seen so far is horrifying and daunting, but it is ultimately only the tip of an iceberg that, unlike real icebergs, is still growing and taking shape. Because the reality is, as the pandemic progresses, the hardest-hit will be those at the bottom of the hierarchies that powerful people have erected to organize our society.

That means the impact of the coronavirus will hit the poor harder because of class stratification, which is of course influenced by other factors like race, queerness, ability, and immigration status. “Identity politics” isn't just a buzzword; when practiced by the powerful, it is foundational to the ways policy has reinforced class divides.

Consider Queens, the borough just north of where I’m writing this in my divey Brooklyn apartment (as I have the luxury to work from home in a city considered an epicenter of the pandemic). Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) represents much of Queens in Congress and has been very vocal about how the area is grappling with COVID-19. She called attention to the dire situation at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens during a floor speech last week and, on Friday, took to Twitter to memorialize a community leader lost to the virus.

“By almost every measure, our Queens community is the hardest hit in the country by COVID,” AOC wrote. “I am heartbroken to share that Priscilla Carrow, a giant & compassionate leader who served as an Elmhurst hospital worker, Community Board 4 member, CWA local 1180 member, has passed.”

Carrow — highly regarded as a community activist, advocate for her coworkers, and legend in her labor union — isn’t the first grassroots leader Queens has lost this week. The borough’s trans Latina community is also mourning the loss of one of their own, Lorena Borjas, who dedicated her life to fighting for trans people, the Latinx community, undocumented immigrants, and sex workers.

The deaths of people like Carrow and Borjas are devastating because they are the champions who inspire us, who have shown us what it means to fight systems of oppression. These same fights they were engaged in do not end because of a national emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic; quite the contrary, they enter new phases of urgency.

Our economy already forces people into life-or-death scenarios when so many of us get health care from our employers; too many live paycheck-to-paycheck while working hard, thankless jobs in fear of an alternative where they might be bankrupted by medical debt in an emergency. The rise of a deadly virus, paired with mass layoffs spawned by an economic shutdown, only make this threat more immediate and dire.