Poverty and Pandemic
We long to return to normal, but **normal led to this**. To avert the future pandemics we know are coming, we MUST grapple with all the ways normal failed us. We have to build something better !
We all have completed our one year in this pandemic, a sudden stillness of livelihoods, economies , education, health etc without any warning or a slight hint of what was gonna happen. The amount of stress mentally and physically every single one of us had to go through was painful, then a slight ray of hope comes almost after a year of complete shutdown of the world, the decreasing numbers with respect to the pandemic. All these facts are well known to us, then why this story? Poverty due to corona is again a well known fact, then why this story? Are we gonna talk about the myths behind the numbers shown to us or false propaganda across the world? My answer for all these questions is a big “NO” ! I’m gonna talk about the possibility of re-occurrence of this pandemic again and again due to poverty and say our so called “Normal” has to change in order to avoid such re-occurrences of any disease!
What is the normal that we need? and why is it different from what we have now? To answer this, let me take an example, of another disease which was once a pandemic just like Covid- TB ( Tuberculosis ). Yes, this disease is a great example to show how poverty or lack of access to public health will bring back the pandemic. This disease not being a big threat to human life currently as per various Governments across, has been affecting the lives of millions of people in countries like India, UK, Bangladesh etc. Yes, I got your mind voice and it is perfectly correct, “ just that the current global pandemic is affecting more people, TB is overshadowed and is not taken seriously”. This is just like, when a bigger problem comes, we forget the other problem !
A lot of it is to do with your mental state and the insecurity of not knowing what is next. It wears you down, and you don’t look after yourself properly, and end up getting ill !
If you closely look at the people affected due to TB, they are mainly the ones living in poverty, homeless in the streets, lack of access to public health and human created differences that deprive them from such basic amenities. When TB was a pandemic, and the countries running behind protecting their people, searching for cure and spending millions of dollars for a short term cure. It did help to reduce the effect and made the pandemic go away but not permanently. TB reappeared again but in less numbers and is still there affecting the people in poverty. The reason for this was the urge for short term cure and not working on the long term affect by spending on the infrastructure and nullifying the social and economical gap and making sure access to cure was available for everyone. Yes, now the same thing is happening again, everyone is running behind short term solution to make sure this is no more a general pandemic and only affecting the cluster in poverty.
Then what is the long term solution? A proper sustainable solution to every single section of the society and reducing the gap in economic freedom, more spending towards long term health infrastructure and making sure everyone has access to it. Unless there is freedom and access for everyone to proper health care and treatment, every single disease small or big, just a local disease or a pandemic, will keep on re-occurring and will be a big threat to human life. So, poverty and socioeconomic gap reduction is the only solution that we all should be looking for.
“I think we are going to see a new era coming out of the pandemic and a desire to reduce these gross inequalities. We need a society where no one has too much or too little.”
