Celebrities may be adulated during normal times when the economy is whirring, when people can buy their merchandise, go to their events, or enjoy their pretty pictures on Instagram. But now?

In this time of crisis, when we’re all dealing with our mental sanity in social isolation, are cooking three meals a day, entertaining younger children or facilitating older children’s online schoolwork, all while attempting to work from the kitchen counter or dining table in a stupefying intensification of home life, nobody is interested in celebrities anymore. They have nothing much to contribute in this instance. Some of them have been lambasted for touting their escapes to fancy second homes. Others tell us to do something with our free time we’ve always wanted to do, like write a book or meditate. Seriously?

Our new heroes are the people on the frontlines of this worldwide health crisis – the nurses, doctors and medical staff, the delivery people and postal workers, grocery store employees and transit drivers, the farmers and shipping clerks, but also the teachers and professors who have hastily had to switch to online teaching to hold the education system together. All of them together maintain a hobbling semblance of society while most of the rest of the world either recovers from the virus or lies low at home out of harm’s way.

Our new heroes are the real people who are essential to our communities and without who we would literally fall into anarchy. Maybe it’s time to recognize that they deserve higher wages, better job security, comprehensive health insurance and sick leave policy, and in general a good social safety net. Will this virus become the great equalizer?