Virus could overwhelm the developing world
Peru tried to do everything right. Officials declared an early national lockdown – and backed it up with 16,000 arrests. Yet confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus are surging, up nearly 60 per cent since last weekend.
In Egypt, observers say a repressive government is vastly undercounting the infected. In Brazil, where the president has dubbed Latin America’s largest outbreak a ‘‘fantasy,’’ numbers are skyrocketing.
New York hospitals and Italian villages are the current front lines of the global pandemic. But epidemiologists and other public health experts say the coronavirus is poised to spread dangerously south, engulfing developing nations already plagued by fraying health-care systems, fragile governments and impoverished populations for whom social distancing can be practically impossible.
They warned of an amplified global crisis in the coming weeks, striking nations that can least afford it at a time when wealthy countries are likely to be too preoccupied with outbreaks of their own to offer the kind of assistance they’ve extended during episodes of disease that were confined to the developing world. Add in the extreme population density and poor sanitary conditions in vast urban slums, and experts warn that the pain of the pandemic is about to tilt quickly from richer nations to poorer ones.
‘‘In three to six weeks, Europe and America will continue in the throes of this – but there is no doubt the center will move to places like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Monrovia,’’ said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. ‘‘We need to be very worried.’’
It’s unknown whether the virus will decline as spring and summer come to the Northern Hemisphere. But if so, there’s rising concern that it will nonetheless continue to build and spread in the Southern Hemisphere winter, raising the potential for retransmission to North America, Europe and Asia later this year.
‘‘There is certainly a significant risk,’’ said Stephen Morisson, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ‘‘It is a highly fast moving, highly transmissible virus that is expected to continue its circulation around the planet. Downstream, as we approach the next wave – (northern) winter 2020-2021 – we have to be worried about importation of the virus from the Southern Hemisphere.’’
The pandemic is already confronting some of the world’s poorest nations with their greatest economic challenge in decades.
Income losses in the developing world are expected to exceed US $220 billion (NZ$370 billion), the United Nations warned on Tuesday. Nearly half of all jobs in Africa could be lost.
Wealthy European governments are paying furloughed workers the majority of their salaries, and millions of Americans who lose their jobs will have access to unemployment benefits. But billions of people in Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America and the Caribbean work in the informal economy, living life on the margins with little to no social safety net.
They are street vendors, house cleaners, motorcycle-taxi drivers. They live off what they earn for the day. They frequently lack property, or savings. Running water. Refrigerators. They’re being told to distance themselves socially while they sleep in rooms crammed in some cases with a dozen or more people. – Washington Post