How do you practice social distancing when homeless during a pandemic? Can you socially distance yourself in a crowded shelter or on the train? I am a community psychiatrist in Minneapolis. Many of my patients are homeless or insecurely housed. All of them have a serious mental illness. My patients have symptoms that prevent them from doing their day to day activities. Sometimes they don’t make it to their appointments because the voices tell them to get off the bus. Sometimes they don’t answer the phone because they are too depressed or because they have delusions that the CIA is listening to their conversations.

During this COVID-19 pandemic as I worry about how to care for my patients, our broken society lies exposed in all its nakedness before our eyes. No treatment I prescribe can work unless my patients have shelter. This is fact — pandemic or not. Think of the things we take for granted, like storing our medications in a safe place or having a bed on which we can rest our bodies as we recover from a cold. How do we wash our hands when we don’t have access to a bathroom? In our capitalist healthcare system, it is not profitable to talk about ending homelessness, so we often don’t. We talk about treating the disease, doing procedures and prescribing medications because unlike housing, we can bill for these services.

The COVID-19 pandemic reminds me of why I joined Doctors for Bernie. We are a grassroots movement of healthcare professionals with a common goal of providing everyone with access to healthcare and electing Senator Bernie Sanders as our next President. Since starting in 2019, we now have approximately 800 members. We are all volunteer healthcare professionals with busy work and personal lives who have dedicated time to knock on doors, phonebank, record videos and write articles advocating for universal healthcare and for the candidate whom we believe can deliver on this. On our most recent phone call we heard emotional testimony from colleagues about how they were caring for their patients, their communities and their families during this pandemic. We talked about how we are here for this very moment — to hold power accountable and to build an equitable society where we do not punish people experiencing medical debt, unemployment and evictions for being sick. COVID-19 will not just make people physically sick, it will put enormous emotional and economic strain on the most vulnerable members of our community.

Senator Sanders has demonstrated time and again that he truly understands how our health is not separate from our social situation. The difference in positions between the two leading Democratic candidates was evident during the Democratic Debate on March 15, 2020. While discussing the COVID-19 pandemic, Vice President Biden talked about leading from the situation room and taking care of things “now” without acknowledging the existing structural problems that make it hard for people to access healthcare even when we are not in a pandemic. Sanders discussed how COVID-19 pandemic had exposed structural problems in society: lack of housing, mental health services, and childcare services, and unjust imprisonment of undocumented immigrants.

The Joe Biden narrative of longing for a return to normalcy in a pandemic is a privilege in a world where for so many of us “normalcy” is a never-ending horror story of racial and economic injustice. By the same token, returning to normalcy is also a privilege when we are only looking at defeating President Trump in the general election without understanding how a racist and misogynist reality TV star appealed to so many Americans in the first place. For so many people, “normalcy” will not change anything in their lives. Normalcy will not get them housing, or access to healthcare. Normalcy will not prevent police shootings or provide debt relief. Normalcy, when Trump is no longer President, would mean that we can go back to dog whistling instead of being blatantly racist. Normalcy when COVID-19 is no longer a pandemic would mean that we can go back to pretending that our healthcare system works for us when it only works for the insurance companies.

The decision by the States of Arizona, Florida and Illinois to proceed with their primary elections amid a pandemic, on March 17, 2020, despite pleas to postpone from public health experts was further evidence that power considers our lives to be expendable. Containing a pandemic and defeating an incumbent racist President requires deep structural changes like the one Bernie Sanders has been advocating for. These are urgently needed structural changes that go beyond electing a President.