Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral… - Adam Hanieh
" "Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral and a lack of to a . The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster — not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes. One clear example of how this disaster is human-made is the poor state of public s across most countries in the South, which tend to be underfunded and lacking in adequate medicines, equipment, and staff. This is particularly significant for understanding the threat presented by COVID-19 due to the rapid and very large surge in serious and critical cases that typically require hospital admission as a result of the virus (currently estimated at around 15–20 percent of confirmed cases). This fact is now widely discussed in the context of Europe and the United States, and lies behind the strategy of "flattening the curve" in order to alleviate the pressure on hospital critical care capacity.
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About Adam Hanieh
is a academic based in the United Kingdom.
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One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. The first two cases of COVID-19 were identified in Gaza on March 20 (a lack of testing equipment, however, has meant that only 92 people out of the 2-million-strong population have been tested for the virus). Reeling from thirteen years of Israeli siege and the systematic destruction of essential infrastructure, living conditions in the Strip are marked by , poor sanitation, and a chronic lack of drugs and medical equipment (there are, for example, only sixty-two ventilators in Gaza, and just fifteen of these are currently available for use). Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine — foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere.
Even inside Europe there is extreme unevenness in the capacity of states to deal with this crisis — as the juxtaposition of Germany and Greece illustrates — but a much greater disaster is about to envelop the rest of the world. In response, our perspective on this pandemic must become truly global, based on an understanding of how the public health aspects of this virus intersect with larger questions of political economy (including the likelihood of a prolonged and severe global economic downturn). This is not the time to pull up the (national) hatches and speak simply of the fight against the virus inside our own borders.
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The imminent public health crisis facing poorer countries as a consequence of COVID-19 will be further deepened by an associated global economic downturn that is almost certain to exceed the scale of 2008. It is too early to predict the depth of this slump, but many leading financial institutions are expecting this to be the worst recession in living memory. [...] Closely connected to this are the measures put in place by governments and s since 2008, most notably the policies of and repeated cuts. These policies aimed at propping up s through massively increasing the supply of ultra-cheap money to financial markets. They meant a very significant growth in all forms of debt — corporate, government, and household.
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