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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| located: | United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, USA |
| editor: | Gurmeet Singh |
Despite the easing of lockdown measures, Coronavirus is still rampant. France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the U.K. and other European nations have begun to ease measures since the R-rate of infection is down and that the initial peak of the virus has passed.
With restaurants and bars reopening, tourism returning and non-essential shops seeing queues developing around the corner, it may seem like the crisis is all but over. This is, of course, a dangerous illusion: the virus is not nearly out of sight.
In developing countries, COVID-19 seems to be fulfilling the worst fears of many, with limited testing, limited social isolation possibilities, crumbling economies and overstrained health sectors. That’s not all. In industrialised countries, partial lockdowns and quarantines have had to be imposed on a number of areas. We may be seeing the beginnings of targeting the poor.
DW reports: “Tenants on one corner in Berlin's southern district of Neukölln have to stay inside.
Since Saturday, the entire building has been under quarantine following an outbreak of COVID-19.
Some 57 people have tested positive — with mild cases — and hundreds of test results are pending.
…"The people being affected right now are those who can‘t even afford an apartment that‘s big enough for their family," [the mayor of the district said]. More than a quarter of Neuköln's population falls along the poverty line, which in Berlin means a monthly net income of less than €1,004 ($1,127).”
This is a building where up to 10 people may be sharing an apartment. This mini-epi-centre, in other words, is the result of people who have to live in cramped conditions because of their relatively poor economic situation.
A virus which spread around the world, thanks in part to the habits and behaviours of a relatively wealthy stratum of society, is now affecting poorer people more intensively. CNN writes:
“When San Francisco implemented its shelter-in-place order in mid-March, the coronavirus continued to spread through the city's Hispanic population in parts of the densely populated Mission District, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco reported Thursday…the health effects of ethnic and socioeconomic inequities in the community increased during San Francisco's shelter-in-place ordinance and helps explain why Latinx people have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic," said Dr. Diane Havlir, the chief of the UCSF Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine and the study's leader.”
This is similar to the U.K., where the number of BAME people with COVID-19 is disproportionately high – again, it has been argued that this is due to socio-economic factors.
In dealing with coronavirus, we may have to pursue the “hammer and the dance” strategy where we have periods of lockdown and easing, but what the Berlin case demonstrates is that we may simply start seeing localised lockdowns of the poorest in our societies.
