After Covid-19, the necessary fight against inequalities

Text by: RFI Follow

Until Sunday May 10, RFI is mobilizing to try to understand what the coronavirus pandemic will change in our lifestyles. While this health crisis has thrown a harsh light on social inequalities, will states be able to draw the consequences?

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Five months after the appearance of the first cases of Covid-19 in China, at a time when the world is gradually fading, the coronavirus crisis delivers its first lessons. "  For the first time at a global level, governments and societies have made the choice to give priority to life,  " notes the doctor, anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin on RFI.

While some projections predicted 40 million deaths worldwide if no action was taken to contain the pandemic, more than half of the states have ordered the containment of their populations, prioritizing health issues over all other considerations, whether public and individual liberties or economic consequences. "  We can oppose at this time the biological life that we are trying to save to the biographical life that we are putting to the test,  " continues Didier Fassin.

📻🔴 Special edition After # COVID19: towards a #NewWorld?

Didier Fassin, sociologist, anthropologist "It is the first time at the world level that governments and their societies privilege life over all other considerations." #RFImatin 👇 pic.twitter.com/xlxCxbGnKA

"  But all the lives will not have had the same value in this moment  ", he tempers. And to quote the homeless who have nowhere to confine themselves, the prisoners, locked up in overcrowded prisons, or the migrants stranded in camps with disastrous living conditions. More generally, the coronavirus crisis has highlighted the inequalities that plague the world, even going so far as to widen them. It has shown that if the disease strikes indiscriminately, the capacity to protect oneself from it varies according to countries and social groups.

► Read also: After Covid-19, towards a new world?

The most modest most exposed

Obliged to defy confinement measures for work and often living in forced proximity, the poorest are thus more exposed to the risk of contamination. These disparities, partly erased by the social protection system offered by European countries, are particularly glaring in those where it does not exist. "  The only point of comparison that we have on a health crisis of this magnitude is the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 which killed 50 million people and which we now know that it hit social groups the hardest. more modest and the countries of the South with mortality rates approaching 5 %, whereas it was lower than 1 % in Europe and North America  ", observes on RFI the economist Thomas Piketty.

For the time being, it is impossible to draw an overall assessment of the current crisis. But in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the case fatality rate - the ratio between the number of confirmed cases and the number of deaths - is much higher in poor neighborhoods: it rises to 30.8% in Maré, all of favelas in the north of the city, against 2.4% in Leblon, the most chic district in the southern zone, by the sea, AFP said.

► Also to listen: In Brazil, the coronavirus is a double punishment for the poorest

Racial inequalities are also more striking. In the state of Sao Paulo, the most populous and most affected in the country, the risk of dying from Covid-19 is 62% higher for people of color, reports AFP again. At the national level, if 36.4% of the patients transferred to the hospital for severe acute respiratory syndrome are black, they represent on the other hand 45.3% of the deaths from Covid-19. Conclusion: white people are more likely to get out of hospital cured. The same is true in the United States . In early April, blacks accounted for 42% of deaths from coronavirus in Illinois, while they constitute 14% of the population. In Chicago, 72% of the dead, while they represent less than a third of the inhabitants

Another lesson brought by this crisis: the need to strengthen health systems. This is particularly the case in France or Italy, where hospitals quickly found themselves overwhelmed by the influx of patients. But also in Côte d'Ivoire, as several Abidjan residents said when interviewed by our correspondent Sidy Yansané .

📻🔴😷 Special edition After # COVID19: towards a #NewWorld?

🇨🇮😷 # CIV In Côte d'Ivoire, the street hopes that the #coronavirus crisis will raise awareness of the importance of a good health system.
🎧 Testimonials at S @SidyYansane #RFImatin 👇 pic.twitter.com/tPm15Acrx9

“  This crisis requires a relaunch of the welfare state in countries that have already developed a social security system. And in all countries where it does not exist, this is an opportunity to create it,  ”argues economist Thomas Piketty on RFI. "  What has enabled growth and development during the 20th century is the reduction of inequalities, the establishment of social protection systems, access to health, education, much more than forward race towards the concentration of fortune and economic power.  "

For Thomas Piketty, will emerge from this crisis a demand for a greater redistribution of wealth and equity. "  I think this crisis should help to rethink the way we think of our economic system in a more equitable and more sustainable way,  " he insists.

📻🔴 Special edition After # COVID19: towards a #NewWorld?
. @ ThomasPiketty "Faced with the environmental crisis, we are ultimately very poor, we do not do much. Let's try to use this experience to redirect the economy into our investments. ” RFImatin 👇 pic.twitter.com/wfFM0C91O8

Special edition, part 1

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Our selection on the coronavirus

• Listen to our daily chronicle  Coronavirus info

• The practical questions  :
→  What is known about the mode of contagion
→  disparities and inequalities in coronaviruses: what to remember
→  What outcomes for clinical trials?
→  A vaccine, the only solution to stem the pandemic?
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→  Birth of a pandemic
→  Everyday life put to the test
→  The history of epidemics
→  Science facing the Covid-19
→  The geopolitical consequences

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