Disease Of Inequality

COVID-19 has drilled deep holes in an already unequal world, making life for the underprivileged unlivable

- Richard Mahapatra

The late microbiologist and environmentalist, René Dubos, famously articulated that every civilisation created its own diseases and epidemics. Into the 8th month of the novel coronavirus disease (covid-19) pandemic, one is convinced about what ours would be: inequality. And it took a pandemic to bring this out. It is now being popularly mentioned as the ‘pandemic of inequality’. Nobody is sure when this defining point of the pandemic would be declared over.

In the last fortnight, global conversations on the pandemic revolved around its impacts on hunger, poverty and inequality, making the world once again slide into a time from where it started talking about various global goals like the Millennium Development Goals (mdgs) and Sustainable Development Goals (sdgs). Recent estimates and analysis show that the pandemic is impacting the already poor more, whether they are in developed or developing countries.

Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres, while delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, said: “The covid-19 pandemic has played an important role in highlighting growing inequalities. It exposed the myth that everyone is in the same boat. While we are all floating on the same sea, it’s clear that some are in superyachts, while others are clinging to the drifting debris.” He highlighted that the world ignored inequality for too long, further putting the poor at greater risk during the pandemic.