The Impact of the Coronavirus Crisis is Due to Inequality

First it was a suggestion and then it became an order: wash your hands and keep your distance. Those two seemingly simple actions represent the world we live in today—a world in which millions of people lack the water necessary for the first order and the space for the second. Later we were told to confine ourselves, something also beyond the reach of many. COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is highlighting the profound inequality that exists in our global society and our states.

As the pandemic spreads, healthcare systems worldwide are finding that they lack the resources necessary to cope with the crisis. It seems that no country had prepared for such a scenario, despite warnings issued by the scientific and economic sectors.

The order to wash our hands must have triggered reactions of disbelief among the millions of people living in the shantytowns, shacks, favelas, and outskirts of cities like Johannesburg, Nairobi, Mexico DF, or San Pablo. If there is anything lacking in these places, it is sanitary facilities and water. In fact, water is increasingly scarce in many countries, mainly due to climate breakdown.

IMMIGRATION GETS NO SICK LEAVE

Until recently, disease outbreaks like this happened in far-off countries of the Global South (think Ebola) or were events of the past (think bubonic plague). But their impacts are now being felt closer to home, just like the impacts of the climate crisis: heat waves in Europe, cities that lose a few centimeters every year to rising oceans in the coastal United States, fires that rage for months in Australia.

In the past decade, the harsh realities that usually affect others have become familiar to us through immigration. Poverty and wars force millions of people to leave their war-torn countries. Border closures, deportations, and pressure on and payments to other countries to stop immigrants from passing through do not address the root of the problem; neither COVID-19 nor Donald Trump's wall will stop people from moving. According to the United Nations, 272 million people worldwide migrated in 2019. Hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers continue to be trapped between armed groups and traffickers who exploit them sexually and through intensive labor. Have the traffickers adopted a stay-at-home policy? Will they maintain a safe distance from their prisoners?

The scenes that take place in the improvised refugee camps set up for those fleeing Myanmar or Syria could also be seen in Italy and Spain: sick people lying on the floors of hospitals that do not have the resources to treat them.

WARS AND PRECARIOUSNESS

UN Secretary General António Guterres requested that ceasefires be declared for the duration of the coronavirus crisis in the approximately 30 ongoing armed conflicts around the world. It is quite unlikely that this will happen. In many ongoing wars, economic interests overpower political interests. When little value is attached to life, nobody will stop fighting for humanitarian reasons, not even to protect their own health.

Organized crime co-opts and coerces communities to work in their illicit production operations, as happens in Mexico and Afghanistan. Maybe the lawyers and politicians who collaborate with organized crime can work from home, but there will be no sick leave or unemployment benefits for those who must produce, transport, and illicitly sell goods in order to feed their families.

COVID-19 is like a blackout that has caught half the world off guard in the elevator of inequality and the myth of a globalization that is supposed to benefit us all. It is true that the virus has no regard for class and may attack the respiratory tracts of the 9.5 percent of the world's population that controls 85 percent of the planet's wealth. But whereas for some people isolation means keeping a safe distance from the domestic staff and making more frequent use of the various home delivery and private healthcare services, for billions of others it implies a series of exponentially growing dramatic dilemmas.

Falling ill is always complicated...