The never ending pandemic of inequality
Daily, we are learning a bit more about Covid. It has taken away loved ones, livelihoods, destroyed the futures of many people. On the flip side, it has accelerated a move to remote working, and reduced commute/ travel, which raises questions on the impact on the planet.
- Is climate change, related in any way to the spread of infectious diseases?
- Are we likely to see more pandemics, like Covid -19, in the future, because of climate change?
- Did lockdowns, online shopping, remote working, ban on travel etc., help the planet?
- We knew upfront that age and underlying conditions could increase the risk of a serious illness due to covid. Did covid impact everyone (across social and economic strata) the same way?
Global warming forces people to move into forested areas, with land use expansion, and animals getting into closer contact with humans due to habitat loss. Climate change is altering the transmission patterns and geographic spread of emerging infectious diseases — 60% of which are zoonotic (that is, transmitted from animal-to-human). Climate change increases the risk of pandemics along two channels:
- unleashing new zoonotic infectious diseases, and
- increasing the range of territories where existing disease vectors (such as mosquitoes and ticks) can thrive.
The changing climate allows existing infectious diseases, once confined to warmer latitudes, to expand their range. Because warmer average temperatures can mean earlier springs, shorter and milder winters, and longer and hotter summers, conditions become more conducive for many vector-borne diseases. Even under the most benign scenarios, our planet and climate will continue to change rapidly, and we are likely to see extreme weather events like the Amphan/ Yaas super cyclones, and the glacier outburst in areas and times, we have never seen before. London has experienced heat waves for the last 3 summers and is likely to see more.
I call Covid 19 as an unequal pandemic, just like climate change. We expect a raging pandemic to affect everyone evenly, across the world isn’t it? Yet, we see that those at the sharp end of this pandemic, are those that were already deprived.
Here in the UK, what we saw was that the people at the front line often from the BAME community, and often from the lower strata of society, were the ones that were most affected. Number of deaths due to Covid, number of people requiring hospital treatment, and in fact those that had rapid community spreads were all from the BAME community. These were people who were doing front end jobs, like delivery workers, nurses, store workers, and the likes who could not work from home. This situation gets worse when you look at the data aand compare between developed and developing countries. Developed countries have 55 hospital beds, at least 30 doctors, and 81 nurses, for every 10,000 people, whereas there are 7 beds, 2.5 doctors and 6 nurses in the developing world. As the Tamil saint poet Thiruvalluvar said, we have to deeply understand the illnesses in our society, identify its root cause, and give it the medicine that is suitable to the society at large. There is no point in quick fixes to these issues.
Lockdowns also created a significant divide among the haves and the havenots. If you look at India, we have a significant number of people working in the unorganized sector, we see that the several such people lost their jobs or were pushed into poverty because of the lockdown. Now going into Africa, it is been observed that almost the half of Africans live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions and only about a third of households have running water and similar to India, a large majority of Africans work in the informal sector. One of the aspects to look at is, it has been slow to make its way into Africa. However, in a sort of worst case scenario, this could be basically a significant number of lives lost significant number of people, who lose their livelihood because of the pandemic. The world has also added significant amount of plastic waste due to the excessive use of single use plastics, which exacerbates the situation with respect to climate change.
Every crisis also presents tremendous opportunities to us, and we did see humanity coming together to help those in need. I have my own views on philanthropy, but will reserve that for another time. Because today’s demand systems are oriented towards the haves, we need to provide security of employment to the have-nots to change the situation. Public policy needs to take into account:
- Cost of a covid test
- Ease of access to testing
- Facility to self isolate — such as sick pay
- Contact tracing
- Affordable level of healthcare for all — we have seen many families being pushed into poverty due to the excessive cost of medical care
- Proliferation of insurance — health, life, and unemployment insurance
Given all this, what can you do to change the situation? Some of my actions are:
- I am part of the advisory board on Tapasya, an NGO in Pune. We are raising funds for supporting Covid relief works.
- I am a Skillanthropist, with Tata Engage.
- I participate in design challenges with OpenIDEO.
- I support the following businesses:
- Hydro Wind Energy
- A plastic road company
- A firm that provides financial protection for independent workers
- A company that produces waterless toilets to help improve sanitation
- A company that uses machine learning to decipher satellite images and optimise clean emergy
- Closed loop system to reduce food waste.
Thanks for reading this first edition of the Helix. We’ll be in touch fortnightly. So leave comments for me, on topics you’d like to see, what you are doing to reduce inequality and the challenges that you face. We can get on a quick call to discuss policy advocacy, data related challenges, investment opportunities, or a question that is nagging you. Lastly, please do follow me on LinkedIn, for more immediate updates.
