COVID-19 is just the latest disease to expose persistent racism and poverty.
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease CollideThe COVID-19 pandemic has made clear how social, economic, racial and political disadvantages occur alongside — and help to cause — inequities in health conditions and health care. People living in crowded circumstances, individuals with existing conditions and those working in unprotected, public-facing settings were all hit earlier and harder than others.
As with other disasters such as floods and fires, viruses do not consciously discriminate, Thrasher says. But “their effects do discriminate against the bodies of the underclass, because those bodies have been placed in proximity to danger by the structural design of powerful humans”.
The case of Andrew Cuomo, a former Democrat governor of New York, shows a different dynamic, in which a decision by a powerful person affects many powerless individuals. Under Cuomo, a state advisory released on 25 March 2020 directed New York’s nursing homes to accept people who had been hospitalized with confirmed or suspected COVID-19, as long as they were medically stable. Nursing homes were not permitted to test the prospective residents for the coronavirus.
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