It is perhaps fitting that the seriousness of the coronavirus threat hit most of the Western world around the Ides of March, the traditional day of reckoning of outstanding debts in Ancient Rome. The previous week had been a veritable roller coaster ride. The World Health Organization (WHO) finally declared the contagion a pandemic, governments scrambled to respond, the virus dominated the news cycle as well as the plethora of mis- and dis-information on social media, cities and even entire countries shut down, markets of every imaginable sort fell and corporations announced layoffs and production stoppages. It became clear that whatever the origins, paths, and lethality of the virus now named COVID-19, it was going to sorely test Western capitalism and its coping mechanisms. Almost certainly, they were going to be found wanting. After all, problems and imbalances have accumulated in the Western capitalist system over four decades, essentially since it took the neoliberal road out of the 1970s crisis and kept going along it, heedless of the crises and problems it led to.
