Covid-19

OP-ED: LOCKDOWN BLUES

Lockdown Blues: Covid-19 in a place of inequality – towards a spatially contextualised mitigation plan

Lockdown Blues: Covid-19 in a place of inequality – towards a spatially contextualised mitigation plan
The photo below shows parts of the informal settlement “wetlands” on the west boarder of Masiphumelele… a few hundred meters is the security village of Lake Michelle. Almost no space for social distancing in Masi. Photo: @UnequalScenes Series.

Around the world, the Covid-19 pandemic is shining a stark light on structural inequalities.

Data from US cities reveal that African American and Latin communities are disproportionately contracting, and dying from, Covid-19.

There appear to be several reasons for this. Chiefly – due to socio-economic marginalisation – these groups are less likely to have access to primary healthcare, they are more likely to suffer from the underlying conditions that render a person especially vulnerable to succumbing to Covid-19 and they are more likely to be essential frontline workers, including public transport drivers, grocery store and sanitation workers and delivery people.

The racialised character of Covid-19 has only recently been acknowledged in the US and in New York City it is only in the past week or so that providing personal protection equipment to transport, grocery, sanitation and delivery workers has been prioritised alongside provision to doctors and nurses (possibly hastened by civil action such as that of workers from Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods threatening to embark on a nationwide sick-out”.

In South Africa, racialised stratification is readily evident, largely correlating with spatial geography, which remains a fairly accurate proxy for socio-economic status.

Enduring a five-week lockdown in the suburbs when you have a car, a pay cheque and a well-stocked grocery store nearby undoubtedly entails frustrations – including how to juggle partnering, parenting, teaching children and the pressures of online working against the backdrop of inevitable pandemic anxieties. But having to endure the lockdown in a township or informal settlement is a fundamentally more challenging and potentially dangerous experience.

Many people living in townships or informal settlements rely on informal sector employment, much of which has dried up under the lockdown leading to escalating unemployment and financial ruin. Others are essential workers who must run the gauntlet of police and soldiers to try to manage their daily lives, including catching taxis to work in urban areas.

Already impoverished households are not able to stockpile groceries and many do not have fridges to store fresh produce, necessitating numerous trips to obtain food. More generally, living in small houses or shacks with many people from different generations makes staying indoors extremely difficult, oftentimes stifling in the heat or paraffin-laden in colder weather.

In addition, the securitisation focus of South Africa’s lockdown has resulted in residents of townships and informal settlements subjected to heavy-handed actions by security forces seeking to enforce lockdown rules in ways that are unimaginable in suburbs, resulting in humiliation, injuries and several deaths.

As the disproportionately heavy economic and civil rights-related costs for poorer communities have become clearer, commentators have begun to question whether the same one-size-fits-all lockdown model makes sense

across all contexts.

To an extent, such academic deliberation has been overtaken by a reality in which, regardless of whether a social distancing lockdown approach is optimal, the answer to whether it is occurring in practice in many parts of South Africa is emphatically no. In the words of one journalist who sought to uncover “whether the concept of lockdown is actually working beyond the middle-class scope of Netflix viewing schedules and that backyard picket fence”:

“The bottom line is a resounding NO. People in a township cannot physically self-isolate: it is virtually impossible, no matter how scared they may be of this virus … Life has no choice but to spill over into the dusty yards and littered streets, because there are four, or six, or maybe more, people to a room. And, somehow, someone needs to put the next meal on the table.”

If it is true that people across South Africa’s townships and informal settlements are not maintaining the same level of social distancing etiquette as in the suburbs (where, it should be noted, there is also rule-breaking but it is arguably less justified), this begs the policy-related question of how to handle this reality.

One option would be to ramp up the security response and brutally enforce social distancing regardless of the catastrophic social and economic consequences. Presumably this option will not be pursued – if for no other reason than it would be politically extremely costly for the government.

That leaves two other apparent options.

The first is to maintain the existing one-size-fits-all approach of the same kind of lockdown whether you live in a suburb or a township or informal settlement, regardless of any inability of the model to work effectively across all contexts.

The appeal of this approach is that it is simpler to administer and communicate and has the benefit of “sticking to the plan”. The downside is that, while it might work to contain the spread of Covid-19 in suburbs, due to widespread non-adherence, lockdown is less likely to achieve its health-related objectives in townships and informal settlements.

The second option is to try to tailor a specific response for township and informal settlement areas.

In a recent article, academics from a range of disciplines at the University of the Witwatersrand came to the conclusion that an extended generalised lockdown is socially and economically unsustainable, and damaging to public health. They propose a risk-based, differentiated approach of beginning to open up the economy, for example starting with childcare facilities and highly-automated industries while continuing to protect more at-risk activities and groups.

I suggest that a similarly variegated spatial approach should be pursued for relaxing the lockdown parameters, starting with townships and informal settlements. Any differentiated measures would first and foremost have to be consultative and participatory and might entail some of the below aspects (alongside a mass rollout of personal protection equipment, water tankers, soap and additional sanitation facilities):

  • Identification of at-risk people (the elderly and those with underlying conditions) to be moved to temporary accommodation on the outskirts of the township or settlement, perhaps along with younger (less vulnerable) family members to look after them if they require assistance.
  •   Short-term intensive campaigns to go area by area, door to door, to test and trace, and quarantine infected persons in separate temporary quarantine areas.

Any such measure that entails the relocation of identified at-risk or infected people would have to be in line with the Disaster Management Act of 2002 and its regulations, which allow for the temporary evacuation of people to temporary shelters for the purpose of preserving life.

Affected people must be able to return home as soon as the public health threat is diminished or their health has improved. 

Another way to pursue a variegated easing of the lockdown conditions in townships and informal settlements would be, as suggested by Neva Makgetla, to allow blocks rather than houses as the unit of isolation. Yet

another approach, which recognises that 24-hour lockdown is not possible in these terrains, would be to restrict movement during certain hours via negotiated curfews.

As acknowledged in the article by the Wits academics, there are no easy win-win solutions to Covid-19. Every approach will benefit some people and disadvantage others, and even well-intentioned application of one-size-fits-all models might have devastating consequences for certain groups or across certain axes.

In deciding which approaches to pursue, it is essential we do not –  however unintentionally – further disadvantage socio-economically excluded groups.

It is therefore critical, even within urgent timeframes, to carefully evaluate the efficacy of approaches and to engage in iterative cost-benefit evaluations across South Africa’s very different spatial contexts. We should certainly not presume, as universal lockdown inherently does, that all communities are equally able to control their environments in the context of the Covid-19 crisis or beyond. DM/MC

 

Jackie Dugard is associate professor at the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand; and visiting scholar at New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, 2020. She can be contacted at [email protected]

 

Gallery

"Information pertaining to Covid-19, vaccines, how to control the spread of the virus and potential treatments is ever-changing. Under the South African Disaster Management Act Regulation 11(5)(c) it is prohibited to publish information through any medium with the intention to deceive people on government measures to address COVID-19. We are therefore disabling the comment section on this article in order to protect both the commenting member and ourselves from potential liability. Should you have additional information that you think we should know, please email [email protected]"

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