What Do COVID-19 and Extreme Inequality Mean for American Democracy?

Danielle Allen joins the Ask a Harvard Professor podcast to discuss COVID-19 and American democracy. Allen explains contact tracing and her recent work.

“The analogy I draw is that when COVID hit, our public health infrastructure was something like a network of country roads, and what we needed was to convert that network of country roads into an interstate highway system overnight,” she says. “And that's just hard work even in the best of circumstances. That means you have organizational processes that have to be redesigned at every level of society. People having to manage contact tracing programs at scales that they're not used to. The complicated problem that we still haven't solved [is] how to pay for testing.”

Listen to the interview