I think the critical thing here is that only a pretty small section of the left is both able and willing to give you the analysis you want.

The NATO-leftist type people (think of the Vaush clique) will just follow whatever the liberal media says. If the liberal media says COVID is over, it's over.

Of the more principled leftists, I think there's a bit of an attention saturation problem, because between Palestine, the broader issue of imperialism, and climate collapse, it already seems like there's too many problems to handle with the rigor and principled criticism that they deserve. Furthermore, many of the leftists in this category will be unwilling to really tackle the COVID question because appropriately stating the scientific socialist position on it (demanding action to protect immunocompromised and elderly folks) runs the risks of fracturing orgs when many people inevitably resist the measures to curb plague rat behavior. Of course, there's the added bit here that it really isn't just about solidarity, if you're a person with a respiratory system you should be taking COVID precautions out of simple self interest.

Think of it like the problem with transphobia 20 years ago. Trans leftists who sufficiently understood gender were always around, but because the liberal left didn't believe they existed, and most of the "principled" illiberal left was of the mind that other struggles were already too much on their plates, they had to make space for themselves inside the left on their own terms over the next decades.

What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]

This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.

from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

Between the other thread complaining that there is little Marxist theory on AI/LLMs and this complaining there is little Marxist theory on COVID, I would just like to point out that there is a lack of leftist theory on pretty much anything. We simply don't have a lot of people who are super well versed in historical theory who are also willing/capable of building a framework for the present. Out of what does exist, a lot of it is focused on history, especially of the 19th and 20th century.

GOOD post.

One new book that bucks the trend - Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass, by Sarah Jones, which I just found at my library and hope to start soon. (The jacket says it's "in the tradition of Matthew Desmond's Evicted . . .", and Desmond gets really defensive when people point out that he really ought to be a Marxist, so I'm assuming it's left-liberal, but still.)

The Death Panel podcast has this niche covered but they're the only ones I know. It's frustrating because a bunch of self-described leftists bought into the convenient lie that covid is over so they wouldn't have to keep masking.

Western governments have certainly made it much harder to be principled and materialist about covid by removing all legal protections and the infrastructure required to treat covid seriously.

Try 70 years.

Found another book for the to-read pile, via Naked Capitalism. Inequality Kills Us All: Covid-19’s Health Lessons for the World, by Stephen Bezruchka.