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As editors of Territory, Politics, Governance, we want first and foremost to express our solidarity with those affected and impacted directly by the COVID-19 pandemic. While none of us is untouched by the current public health crisis, what has unfolded thus far reveals only too clearly the inbuilt inequalities of contemporary capitalist society in terms of mortality, illness and recovery (for a pre-COVID-19 discussion of the United States, see Case & Deaton, 2020; and for the UK, see Wilkinson & Pickett, 2011). In the UK and United States, for example, ethnic minority communities are overrepresented in terms of mortality from COVID-19 (The Guardian, 2020a). Key workers (and ethnic minority communities are overrepresented in some areas such as health and social care) continue to operate in circumstances (not of their own choosing) where, depending on country and locale, the availability of personal protection equipment (PPE) is widely different in terms of efficacy, quality and protection standards. Crises often reveal what Shuster (2020) describes as structural inequalities (such as the unequal distribution of resources or the uneven delivery of healthcare) that produce harmful effects against some groups more than others. The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) released March–April 2020 data for England and Wales which revealed that COVID-19-related death rates in the most deprived areas are more than double those of the less deprived. Profound socioeconomic-, gender-, class- and ethnicity-related disparities in COVID-19 mortality are being revealed on a weekly basis (ONS, 2020).
Demands to practise ‘social distancing’ reveal, moreover, further social and spatial schisms as the capacity and capability to do so will depend on household dynamics, social capital, financial resources and the uneven effects of community policing. For example, in many countries there is an urgent and ongoing discussion about the fate of vulnerable and elderly communities and the longer term restrictions they face on their social relationships and physical movements. This may stoke extreme resentment about unequal mobility, prolonged isolation, and fuel mental and physical crises (Brooke & Jackson, 2020). The present pandemic is raising fundamental questions about what makes a community, a population and a nation sustainable. Social equity and intergenerational justice are integral to well-being and sustainability in space and over time. Multigenerational households will be particularly affected by social distancing measures, and they have in turn become more prevalent in advanced economies such as the United States during the last decade due to recession and austerity. Around 20% of the US population lives in a multigenerational household compared with 12% in 1980 (Pew Research Center, 2018). In India, the National Family Health Survey conducted in 2015–16 concluded that at least four in ten households are multigenerational (Hindustan Times, 2020).
Pandemics, like natural disasters and austerity, reveal that we are not all in it together (Davidson & Ward, 2018; Harris & Keil, 2008). There is instead an uneven capacity to act and react for some while opportunities abound for profiteering by others (Loewenstein, 2017; Parthasarathy, 2018). For all the attention given to European citizens and their lockdown experiences, in other parts of the world such as India public health measures have effectively magnified further disadvantaged conditions before the virus itself. The declaration of a lockdown in India was announced at short notice in March 2020 and gave no opportunity for residents and migrants to return home within India, let alone beyond. The disastrous loss of income and livelihood resulted in a spike of suicides and accidents, as the most vulnerable in particular struggled to cope with the magnitude of the disruption. In the Middle East, migrant labourers from India and Pakistan have accused their respective states of not being willing to help them return home. Local embassies and missions have had to provide emergency supplies as labour markets shut down. The social and economic geographies of the pandemic are in themselves revelatory of the precariousness of contemporary life for hundreds of millions of people around the world (Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, 2020).
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