Book Review: The Unequal Pandemic Covid-19 and Health Inequalities by Clare Bambra, Julia Lynch and Katherine E. Smith

Abstract

Socio-political circumstances combined with economic inequalities have historically been part of pandemics such as the influenza, or Spanish flu, pandemic of 1918, the N1H1 outbreak of 2009, and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2019. Using historical data, Bambra, Lynch, and Smith examine to what extent previous public health emergencies and the current Covid-19 crisis have impacted different spectrums of society. Questioning the way various governments approached the lockdown, the authors argue that the Covid-19 pandemic further widened the gap between the rich and the poor. For instance, in India, the sudden announcement of lockdown led to the mass migration of poor migrant workers. What is remarkable about this work is that the authors have focused on the plight of the disadvantaged sections of society, who were the biggest victims of this global pandemic. It would be pertinent to mention here that the Covid-19 pandemic struck when many countries were already facing political and economic backsliding. The book consists of six chapters. Each chapter explores how the Covid-19 pandemic turned everyday life upside down, particularly that of the marginalised communities. Interestingly, the book shows glaring differences in how various governments made ‘varying efforts’ to control and manage the pandemic. For instance, New Zealand took strict and effective measures and closed their borders while Sweden took a more laissez-faire approach, merely restricting public gatherings. During the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, Australia, South Korea, and Germany took health surveillance measures like contact tracing and introduced individual quarantine to control the spread of the virus. The Covid-19 pandemic acts as an ‘unequal contagion’, which, according to the authors, discriminates differently by posing huge risks to some sections and fewer risks to other sections depending upon their social and economic background. By arguing so, however, the authors also recognise the vulnerability of the masses to the Covid virus, irrespective of their political and economic status. The Unequal Pandemic seeks to argue that the Covid-19 pandemic is unequal in four broad ways: it is killing unequally, it is being experienced unequally, it is impoverishing unequally, and its inequalities are political. Explaining massive mortality rates among the weaker sections of the society, the authors focus on the bigger picture of how pre-existing inequalities based on social, ethnic, occupational, intersectional, and geographical inequalities have worsened the impact of Covid-19 on certain sections of society. Book Review