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From New Yorker

From Vox

The truth is this piece of fabric, a simple sack with two straps, can always hug you as you walk around or as you explore a new place, with all its memories, with the strength to carry anything you put inside it, and the ability to share a little bit of yourself with the world anywhere you go.

Nicole Collazo Santana is a New York City-based journalist and a part of the first cohort of the Vox Media Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in Refinery29, NPR, 9 Millones, and more.

Anything that comes up along the way — a flat tire, an accident, a traffic jam — could derail that process, and it’s usually up to the truck driver to figure it out. In places like the US, this also adds pressure for owner-operators (truckers who also own their vehicles) or who undertake lease-purchase agreements (paying toward eventually owning a truck). Those hiccups could limit the number of trips drivers make, and with it, their ability to pay off their truck, let alone make a living wage.

The pandemic also accelerated some of these trends. The average truck driver previously waited about 2.5 hours at warehouses, according to a 2018 figure, but closures during Covid-19 and supply chain bottlenecks have made that even more unpredictable.

Around the world, the trucking workforce is aging. In the US, the average age of a truck driver is 46, according to a 2019 report from the American Trucking Associations. Across Europe, it’s 44. In the United Kingdom, the average age of heavy-goods vehicle drivers is 53. Some of these folks are nearing retirement, and the risk of getting sick and the uncertainty and early slowdowns of the pandemic helped accelerate truck drivers’ departures from the industry.

“Think back [to] the beginning of Covid, when everything was shut down. An over-the-road truck driver couldn’t even find a place to take a bath, eat a meal, or a lot of other things, because those places were shut down,” Martin Garsee, executive director of the National Association of Publicly Funded Truck Driving Schools, said. “So if you are on the bubble of trying to think about how am I going to retire, at that point, what would be your answer, if you could retire? Or if you could find another job?”

And for all the reasons outlined above, it can be a struggle to find new recruits to replace them. In the US and Europe, employers have relied on immigrant labor, but, as experts said, that doesn’t fix any of the structural issues, and creates what Belzer called “this constant race to the bottom.”

Parts of Western Europe, for example, often relied on labor from poorer European countries to fill truck driving jobs, but as those economies improved, those sources of labor became scarcer. The United Kingdom’s truck driver shortages have been exacerbated by Brexit, and the changes to immigration rules that came with it. Prime Minister Boris Johnson offered 5,000 short-term, temporary visas to some European truck drivers to ease backlogs around the holidays, but few actually took the offer. As one Polish driver told a British outlet, why come back for a few months just to “pee in a bottle on the M25?”

Other parts of the world face different challenges. Stefan Pertz, who’s based in Malaysia and runs Asian Trucker, a media company for the commercial trucking industry in Southeast Asia, told me that in Malaysia truckers make about $800 to $900 a month, a salary that can go quite far there. But, again, at what cost? Drivers are highly surveilled, sometimes only able to stop at certain rest areas. Sometimes poor infrastructure and roadways present additional hurdles. These challenges exist in other lower-income countries, compounded by another issue: You have people willing to drive trucks, but companies or businesses may not have enough vehicles. “It’s not the labor issue, it’s the asset, it’s the truck itself,” Rodrigue said.

These are longstanding challenges, and the pandemic created a kind of breaking point for the industry, even as the vital link truckers play in the economy became clearer. But the way the supply chain functions may make it harder to fix the global driver shortage.

Allison Zaucha/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trucks enter the Port of Los Angeles in California in November.

Truck drivers and the human costs of our global supply chain

The toughness of being a truck driver — the long hours, the treks, the waiting at ports or warehouses to get the goods — isn’t an accident. It’s mostly a consequence of being caught up in the demands of the modern supply chain, the one that is under so much pressure now.

Experts told me that even as wages for truckers have declined, shipping and logistics companies are increasing their rates. But that hasn’t really trickled down to the truck drivers’ pockets. “The trucking companies fight over the scraps. And the drivers fight over the scraps left over after the trucking companies fight over it. All of this cascades down, and the most powerful party here is always the one to win,” Belzer said.

And, he added, when it came to truckers: “Because of where they stand in the power relations throughout the supply chain, they’re the least powerful people.”

Experts and those involved in the trucking industry said wages for truckers have ticked up because of the labor demand in this stage of the pandemic, just as they have in other parts of the labor market in the US. There may be good signing bonuses to be had, too. But truckers don’t have a say in the routes they drive, or how long it takes for their cargo to be offloaded at a port. The job remains difficult, and it might not be enough.

“It’s pretty simple,” Joe Michel, executive director for the Alaska Trucking Association, said. “Pay them more, treat them better, they’ll stick around.” In the US, the Biden administration announced a trucker retention plan, which includes recruiting more veterans and studying working conditions to improve the industry. But those won’t transform the industry overnight, or be a quick fix to supply chain problems.

And these questions are arising as the omicron variant of the coronavirus surges, bringing an added uncertainty to the economy. But it’s also a reminder that we rely on truckers to deliver the surgical masks and the Lysol and the food to cook when we’re quarantining. They are the essential workers, and the question really is whether they are being treated as such.

During the lockdown, Pertz said, campaigns popped up everywhere describing truckers as heroes. “The minute the lockdowns were erased, all that disappeared again,” he said. “And my challenge is, well, these truck drivers are still stocking my supermarket, nothing has changed for them. Why aren’t they continuously promoted as heroes, and only in the situation of absolute dire needs?”

Looking at this data might make you wonder about some of the predictions that were floating around before omicron came on the scene. In the fall, some health experts were saying that they thought the delta variant might represent the last big act for this pandemic, and that we could reach endemicity in 2022.

The outlook is more uncertain now. So how should you be thinking about the trajectory and timeline of the pandemic going into the new year? And how should omicron be shaping your everyday decision-making and risk calculus?

When we’ll know we’re finally in “endemic” territory

Here’s one big question you’d probably like the answer to: Does omicron push endemicity farther off into the future? Or could it actually speed up our path to endemicity by infecting so much of the population so swiftly that we more quickly develop a layer of natural immunity?

“That is really the million-dollar question,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told me. “It’s really hard to say right now.”

That’s partly because endemicity isn’t just about getting the virus’s reproductive number down to one. That’s the bare minimum for earning the endemic classification, but there are other factors that come into play, too: What’s the rate of hospitalizations and deaths? Is the health care system overburdened to the point that there’s a precipitous space or staffing shortage? Are there treatments available to reduce how many people are getting seriously ill?

In general, a virus becomes endemic when we (health experts, governmental bodies, and the public) collectively decide that we’re okay with accepting the level of impact the virus has — that in other words, it no longer constitutes an active crisis.

With omicron surging right now and many governments reimposing stricter precautions as a result, it’s clear we’re still in crisis mode. “But so much depends on the burden it’ll place on the health care system,” Rasmussen said. “And that’s going to be different from community to community.”

Even though omicron so far seems to result in milder disease than previous variants, a massive increase in cases could still lead to a big increase in hospitalizations and deaths. That could further stress health care systems that are already in dire straits. That’s why Rasmussen concludes that “omicron certainly has the potential to delay endemicity.”

But there are also some hopeful things to bear in mind. “The incredible number of infections is building up population-level immunity. That’ll be crucial in terms of muting future waves,” said Joshua Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In addition to omicron potentially building up some immunity in the vast numbers of people who are becoming infected with it, vaccinations and boosters are also contributing to “a significant immunity wall that’s being built,” he said. But he cautioned that “that’s a wall to the variants we’ve seen already. There could be another variant which could evade immunity down the road.” Some experts are already conjecturing that getting infected with omicron may not give you much cross-protection against other variants, though a small early study showed positive signs on that front.

This is why Ramussen says “the key determinant” of when the pandemic ends is how long it will take to make vaccines accessible around the world (and to combat ongoing vaccine hesitancy). Currently, we’re not vaccinating the globe fast enough to starve the virus of opportunities to mutate into something new and serious. “If only a very small proportion of people are getting access to vaccines, we’re just going to keep playing variant whack-a-mole indefinitely,” Rasmussen said.

In the meantime, we do have another ace up our sleeves, which will hopefully also become available around the globe sooner rather than later: new treatments — like Pfizer’s paxlovid, recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and Merck’s molnupiravir, also FDA approved — that reduce the rates of hospitalization and death from Covid-19.

“Very important in the context of endemicity is the antiviral pills,” Michaud said. “If we have those tools, we’re looking at a very different state going into 2022. People shouldn’t feel like we’re back to square one.”

We’re not back to March 2020. But it makes sense to modify our behavior during the omicron surge.

Dire headlines notwithstanding, we’re in much better shape than we were at the start of the pandemic. We’ve discovered a lot more information about how Covid-19 works. We’ve manufactured effective masks, vaccines, boosters, treatments, and rapid tests.

We’ve also learned that having to hunker down comes at a real cost to our mental and economic health and wellbeing. The cost of a strict lockdown may have been worthwhile in March 2020, but by and large, that’s not what US experts are advising now.

They are, however, urging us to take more precautions than we might have been in the weeks leading up to omicron.

Take Bob Wachter, for example, the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California San Francisco. In the fall, he shifted from being very cautious about Covid-19 to taking some more calculated risks, including dining indoors at restaurants and even hosting an in-person medical conference with 300 attendees. But now that omicron is causing cases to skyrocket, he’s being more cautious again.

“I see the next few months as a time to fortify one’s safety behaviors,” he wrote on Twitter. Here’s how he explained his reasons:

… and most importantly people (many MDs/RNs out sick too). Trust me, you want to avoid getting sick when the system is stressed. Third, I see the Pfizer oral anti-viral as a very big deal, and it won’t be available for 4-6 weeks (even then it’ll be in short supply).(10/25)

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) December 17, 2021

The other experts I spoke to agreed that now is a time to limit risky activities.

“I had taken my foot off the brakes in terms of my own behavior. But I’ve now started to put it on again,” Michaud told me. “I canceled plans to go to New Jersey to visit my family over Christmas. I’m avoiding more indoor environments. As of now, it does make a lot of sense to me to take additional steps to prevent yourself and those around you from getting infected.”

After the omicron wave passes, he said, he envisions relaxing precautions again. Modeling suggests that omicron could peak in mid- to late January in the US, with case rates steeply declining — and activities becoming correspondingly safer again — in February.

Rasmussen is also modifying her behavior in light of omicron, though she emphasizes that’s not the same as going back to a spring 2020-style lockdown. Although she canceled an international flight over the holidays, she still felt comfortable going over to her colleague’s house for a Christmas meal. That’s because she and they had vaccinations, boosters, rapid tests, and great ventilation working in their favor.

“We have a lot more tools at our disposal for dealing with this than we did in March 2020,” she said.

We’ll know endemicity has arrived when those tools — and the long, painful experience of the pandemic itself — has enabled us to fully adapt to the virus, as the virus has adapted to us.

Update, January 1, 2022: This story has been updated to reflect new evidence on the severity of omicron illness.

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