The emerging Corona virus (Covid-19) has begun to affect black-dominated slums in South Africa more severely than previously egg-white areas, according to new data highlighting the lasting impact of housing policies during the apartheid regime today.
More than 27 years after the end of the white minority rule, South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, according to a World Bank statement, with urban areas now being divided starkly along ethnic lines.
This comes as government programs have shown that towns in the Western Cape Province, which are currently the hottest points of the Coruna virus in South Africa, suffer from particularly high infection rates.
Numbers and indications
Government figures show that about 12% of all infections in Western Cape are in "Kailica", which is the largest randomized case in Cape Town, although it includes only 6% of the province's population.
By contrast, Stalenbosch, known as the wineland and university town, has only 1% of cases in the Western Cape Province, although it makes up about 4% of its population, and other hotspots include the town of Mitchellsplain, which suffers from 9% of injuries.
The researcher at the Housing and Human Rights Institute at the Institute of Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, Edward Molube, explained in his talk to the island that the reason for the slums turning into hotbeds of the virus is due to the failure of South Africa to dismantle the apartheid system.
The last days in South Africa witnessed demonstrations by blacks protesting the police brutality in the slums, following the protests of the campaign "Black Life is Important" in the United States.
Human rights defenders said that the authorities deployed security forces to enforce closures mainly in poor black areas such as densely populated slums, where high population numbers made proper quarantine impossible.
The absence of equality
The attorney general for housing and forced evictions at the Institute of Social and Economic Rights in South Africa, Kossilwa Dianti, explained that South Africa was suffering from poor inequality previously in several provinces, especially in the ownership and housing system, but the emergence of the virus and the closure of the country showed brutal disadvantages close to The days of apartheid.
In her interview with Al-Jazeera Net, Dianti pointed out that inequality was "brutally" greater in the cities of Cape Town and Durban during the ban, as several cases against the municipalities arrived to evacuate them during the embargo period, adding that they had been unable to provide any assistance yet.
Dantei said that the virus revealed only a slight change in the cities of South Africa since the end of apartheid, explaining that during the apartheid period blacks had to live in crowded and unhealthy places below the good standard of living away from economic opportunities, which is what they are now living in at some point After the apartheid system, but democratically.
For his part, commissioner from the South African Human Rights Commission, an independent organization, Chris Nissen, revealed what he called "brutal inequality in South Africa."
Speaking with Al-Jazeera, Nissen said, "People say that all lives should be important, but what about people in slums? Is not their life important, too?"
The Cape Town municipality has partnered with the Ministry of Water and Sanitation to distribute 41 million liters of water in "informal" slums to help with hygiene and hand washing to limit the spread of the virus.
Serve the weak
A member of the city's Water and Waste Committee, Alderman Limburg, said in a press statement to the media that they are still committed to doing everything in their power to find solutions to the challenges in what he called "serving our vulnerable population."
As is the case in many poor communities in South Africa, and indeed across the continent, families often live in slums in narrow single rooms and share external toilets with dozens of neighbors, while there is no real debate about whether they are likely to deal State with the Corona virus.
Compounding these fears is the uncertainty about the impact of the new virus on people who are already infected with HIV, especially 2.5 million people in South Africa who are infected and who do not take antidepressants.
"It is likely that we will see in these individuals more severe infections," said Professor Salim Abdul Karim, who heads the leading AIDS research center in the coastal city of Durban.
Many South African health experts share this concern, some of whom particularly describe the continent as a "small fund".
According to the latest official statistics, the numbers of people infected with the Coronavirus in South Africa have exceeded 100,000, while the number of deaths has approached two thousand deaths.