“You can look at it as socialized medicine,” Representative Ted Yoho, a Republican from Florida, told HuffPost. “But in the face of an outbreak, a pandemic, what’s your options?”

As I said, it’s almost funny: Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic. But the laugh catches in your throat, because the only joke here is the sick one American society plays on workers every day.

The truth is that we’re nowhere near turning into Denmark. Many of the newly announced worker-protection policies, like sick leave and flexibility, are limited, applying only to the effects of this coronavirus (the exception is Darden’s new sick-leave plan, which the company says is permanent). The administration’s proposed relief plan could well be vaporware. And Republicans’ interest in universal health care is ephemeral. Call it Medicare For All But Just For This One Disease.

But there’s an even deeper tragedy at play, beyond the meagerness of the new benefits. The true embarrassment is that it took a pandemic for leaders to realize that the health of the American work force is important to the strength of the nation.

As the coronavirus spiders across the planet, I’ve been thinking about the illness as a very expensive stress test for the global order — an acute, out-of-nowhere shock that is putting pressure on societies at their weakest points. Some nations, like Iran and perhaps Italy, are teetering under the threat; others, like South Korea, are showing remarkable resilience. The best ones will greet the crisis as an opportunity to build a more robust society, even better prepared for a future unseen danger. The worst will treat it as a temporary annoyance, refusing to consider deeper fixes even if they somehow stagger through this crisis.

It is not yet clear how well the American system will respond, but the early signs are far from encouraging. What we’re learning is that our society might be far more brittle than we had once imagined. The virus has laid bare our greatest vulnerability: We’ve got the world’s biggest economy and the world’s strongest military, but it turns out we might have built the entire edifice upon layers and layers of unaccounted-for risk, because we forgot to assign a value to the true measure of a nation’s success — the well-being of its population.

Much of the danger we face now grows out of America’s tattered social safety net — the biting cost and outright lack of health care and child care and elder care, the corporate war on paid leave, and the plagues of homelessness and hunger. As the virus gains a foothold on our shores, many Americans are only now waking up to the ways these flaws in the safety net cascade into one another. If companies don’t pay workers when they’re off sick, they’ll have an incentive to work while ill, endangering everyone. If you don’t cover people’s medical bills, they may not seek medical help, endangering everyone.