The Fury of COVID-19 by Vinay Lal

Author:Vinay Lal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

CHAPTER XII

The Virus and the Vice of Discrimination

Whatever else the virus may be, it is not democratic. In the ‘early days’ of its worldwide peregrinations, after it had left the shores of China and made inroads into wealthy Europe, SARS-CoV-2 even appeared to have some special affinity for the rich and well-to-do. It struck western Europe with vehemence and sent Italy, Spain, France, and (though few people were talking about these countries) The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland reeling. The worst was yet to come. New York, the financial powerhouse of the world, thought it had seen everything that could be thrown at it after terrorists hijacked two aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Some 2,800 people died that day. By April 7–8, New York City alone was accounting for 700–800 deaths every day from the coronavirus, and it retains the distinction of having more deaths – 22,600 as of July 4 – than any other city in the world. Elsewhere in this book I have described what I call the humbling of America, the spectacle of the richest and most powerful country in the world, which boasts about nearly everything, and certainly about having the best medical care in the world, reduced to a state that defies comprehension. But if the affluent West seemed to have provided the virus with hospitable homes, many of the poor countries posed a different puzzle to those pondering the unreliable course of the coronavirus: why had they been spared? How is it, to take the illustration of Africa, a continent that Donald Trump with his usual despicable bravado described as composed of ‘shithole countries’1, that it had virtually almost no infected cases at the beginning of April, and that as of July 4 the entire continent of 1.2 billion people had fewer than half the deaths of New York City?2 Could it be that the virus is ‘democratic’ in its own fashion, latching on the rich and ignoring, as states and societies habitually do, the poor? For once, it seemed that the poor had been not been earmarked for yet more discrimination, and perhaps they had been spared.

Africa is so much associated in the minds of so many people with authoritarian rulers, tinpot dictators, stagnation, endemic disease, poverty, and ‘underdevelopment’ that its ‘escape’ from the virus might seem like an overdue form of recompense for the suffering that has been inflicted upon its people. We should take first the names of several countries, noting the number of cases and deaths, respectively, as of July 4: Nigeria: 28,167, 634; Ghana: 19,388, 177; Sudan: 9,767, 608; Kenya: 7,577, 169; Rwanda: 1,092, 3; and Angola: 346, 19. Some have thought that it is the fact that Africa still remains comparatively less integrated into the world economy and the circuits of global travel that accounts for the astonishingly low case load. The COVID-19 crisis has unfolded slowly, says one writer of Sudan, ‘due to the country’s comparative isolation from world

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