Can COVID-19 change the way we talk about barriers to good health?
By Meera Vijayann, +SocialGood Advisor.
In early March, when countries around the world were still reckoning with the spread of coronavirus (a novel strain of SARS-CoV), I found myself thinking about the epidemics we have lived — and fought — through over the years.
I was born in the late 80s in India, a country that is now home to 1.3 billion people. Merely ten years before my birth, India eradicated smallpox, a deadly viral disease that disfigured and killed thousands of people on the subcontinent. It was no easy endeavor; a relentless army of dedicated health workers, local communities, aid agencies, and international health experts took on the challenge of navigating India’s complex bureaucracy to curb the spread of the disease. It wasn’t the first or last time that India had to fight an epidemic — and its own people.
In the 27 years that I lived in India, I’ve witnessed several disease outbreaks that have affected my community: polio, SARS, H1N1 (Swine Flu), dengue, chikungunya, leprosy, hepatitis. I was one of millions of Indian children fortunate enough to receive the polio and hepatitis vaccines early on. I’ve been hopeful when we reached milestones. But I’m also aware that the privilege that I have (of accessing healthcare) is not extended to many of my fellow citizens. It is unacceptable that barriers to health today remain just as solid as they did during the smallpox years.
And this not a problem in India alone.
Since COVID-19 began to spread in 2019, thirty-five million people have been infected around the world. More than one million have died. Countries across Europe — Germany, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Ireland — have seen surges in infections. The Czech Republic has entered a state of emergency. In several parts of Africa, there are new questions being raised about the efficacy of testing. In the United States, more than 7 million people have been infected and over two hundred thousand people have died.
The disease has laid bare the real reasons behind a poorly coordinated global response to health. And it’s that most health challenges don’t just stem from access but also from complex socio-economic reasons ranging from politics, class, caste, gender, and race. Without tackling inequity at its core, barriers to health will always remain. There’s a reason why women, the LGBTQI community, and people from marginalized backgrounds have faced the worst consequences of lockdowns. Not only was safe access to healthcare absent, there were no plans to deal with issues that permeate a citizen’s daily life. For example, stay-at-home orders increased the risk of domestic violence for women; and millions of people have been pushed into poverty and hunger with no alternatives for work and no access to clean water, food, and sanitation. In March, when thousands of migrant workers in India began to walk barefoot, thousands of miles, towards their homes, it was a glaring visual of our world at its absolute worst.
There must be a cross-sectoral, bottom-up, multi-pronged approach to provide healthcare for all by 2030. To do this, good health shouldn’t be looked at as a means to an end, but rather, it should be observed — and understood — as a human right. The constant stream of disinformation about the veracity of health sources, conspiracy theories, and pseudo-science will definitely prove a major hurdle. But hurdles can be overcome when there is a united and strong institutional machinery to take them on.
If there’s one lesson I learned from witnessing so many outbreaks in my home country, it’s that there is power in collective work. No act of resistance is successful if one stands alone.
