This issue of Monthly Review includes three articles addressing questions of epidemiology and health: John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Capital and the Ecology of Disease”; Vicente Navarro, “What Is Happening in the United States?”; and Jennifer Dohrn and Eleanor Stein, “Epidemic Response: The Legacy of Colonialism.” Taken together, they cover a wide range of issues: economic, ecological, epidemiological, and political. But for each of them, the current COVID-19 crisis necessarily looms in the background. Where capitalism itself is concerned, the dominant view is that the COVID-19 crisis is simply an external, “black swan” event: something that has entered from outside the system, constituting a rare, unpredictable, and unlikely to be repeated occurrence. The world capitalist economy, we are informed, was fundamentally sound prior to the advent of this unforeseen exogenous shock, and it will revive quickly once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is under control.