When it comes to the coronavirus, we’re learning not all of us are equal. Celebrities, some elites (remember that word ‘some’) and NBA stars—even boorish ones—can get tested straight away, while everyone else is being denied, even many with symptoms.

Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson were tested. Idris Elba was tested. Sean Payton was tested. The entire Utah Jazz’s NBA team was tested, using half of the state of Oklahoma’s daily allotment of test kits—this after the Jazz’s Rudy Gobert previously mocked fears of the virus by intentionally touching microphones at a press conference. (Nice.) Kevin Durant was also tested along with Nets teammates and many other NBA teams.

And 100 or so wealthy New Yorkers belonging to Sollis Health, a so-called medical concierge service, were able to obtain tests with ease. Sollis, you should know, offers “house calls, with a portable X-ray machine, to our members in the Hamptons during the summer months.” (Of course it does.)

Now I sincerely wish all the best and a speedy recovery to any of those aforementioned folks who are ill. And if they had symptoms when they requested a test, they 100% should have been tested. But I’m also saying that others, i.e., many thousands of Americans with symptoms who are being denied testing should be tested too. They should not be a lower priority.

“This whole crisis is like an X-ray revealing the inner workings of the social/economic structures,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

If it makes you feel any better, (and it shouldn’t) some high-profile people are in fact being turned down. Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan became highly symptomatic and was turned down for a test. She naturally wrote about it with her usual eloquence and outrage. And then there’s Congressman Don Beyer (D-Va.) who was exposed to a person that had COVID-19. Beyer asked Dr. Brian Monahan, the attending physician of the United States Congress and the United States Supreme Court, to be tested and was denied. Beyer and his wife self-quarantined and are both fine.

“I didn't get any special treatment and yeah that’s fair,” Beyer told me on Friday. “But it’s really not about me or Congress. The real concern is the population in this country who don’t have resources and access to health care.” Poor people, people of color, undocumented workers and the homeless will get sick disproportionately Beyer argues. “The coronavirus really magnifies and accentuates various forms of inequality in our country,” he said.

But the testing gap is hardly the only divide when it comes to this pandemic.

Think first about the people who still have to go to work versus the people who get to work from home. This is a salaried versus hourly divide, or what we used to call blue collar versus white collar. I was taking the New York City subway into the office every day until this Wednesday, when I began to work from home, and each day there were fewer and fewer professionals. The subway became almost entirely a train car of cashiers, delivery guys, and cleaners.

These folks can’t just flip on Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, WebEx (like I can) to restructure sick balance sheets, formulate HR strategies or code. They have to operate cash registers, deliver food and sweep up pharmacies, in other words man the jobs that the government now considers essential. They don’t have a choice of course. They have to go to work, putting themselves in harm’s way, because the boss says so, but also because what are they going to do, quit? It’s not like they have some brokerage account at Morgan Stanley to fall back on.

Phillip Ruiz, 34, an Amazon warehouse worker at a facility in Staten Island for the past year and a half, who makes $18.70 per hour, has been reluctant to go to work for fear of getting sick.

“My dad is two years away from 80 and has pre-existing conditions. I don’t want to put him at risk,” says Ruiz. “They’re treating this like we don’t want to go in. It’s not the case at all, who wouldn't want to go into work and make money under normal circumstances.”

View photos Food delivery driver Dori McGuire Guy wears a protective mask as she loads a take-out order into her car at the Pike Place Market, Friday, March 20, 2020, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) More