All it took was a global epidemic of potentially unprecedented scale and severity and suddenly it’s like we’re turning into Denmark over here.

In the last few days, a parade of American multinationals that had long resisted providing humane and necessary benefits to their workers abruptly changed their minds, announcing plans to pay and protect even their lowest-rung employees harmed by the ravages of the coronavirus.

Because the virus is coldly indiscriminate and nearly inescapable, it leaves us all, rich and poor, in the same boat: The only way any of us is truly protected is if the least among us is protected.

Everyone’s a socialist in a pandemic