How COVID-19 Reveals Structures of Vulnerability

Abstract

As coronavirus infection spread across Europe and north America to much poorer parts of the world, calls for personal protection – hand washing, physical distancing, and masks – highlighted the structural challenges of implementation. Australians took to panic buying, physically fighting over toilet rolls in supermarkets, precipitating a national shortage. As Susan Levine noted dryly, elsewhere many people don’t have toilets. At the same time as the toilet paper rush, the South African Institute of Plumbers ran a 90-minute webinar for hundreds of plumbers and laborers on infrastructure and infectious disease control, with Lenore Manderson taking questions on the risks of what was now essential front-line work in maintaining taps, pipes and toilets. This was virtual applied anthropology.These personal measures were complemented by public health directives, worldwide, for populations to stay home, or in the US, to “shelter in place.” In these noisy early days, little attention was paid to what this might mean for those who had nowhere to shelter, who were living in temporary, rudimentary or inadequate housing, or were already at risk at home. At any time, overcrowding, poor maintenance, intermittent power, lack of fuel and water, an insanitary environment, and lack of municipal services, compromise health, exacerbating mental health problems and nurturing the transmission of parasitic, viral and bacterial diseases. COVID-19 fed on this. It thrived on the structural vulnerabilities that worldwide shape access to, quality and security of housing. Structural vulnerability, as defined by Quesada, Hart and Bourgois (2011), derives from economic exploitation and discrimination; we use this term routinely to explain how the disparities of class, culture, gender, sex and race impact on individuals, families and communities. Here, however, we also acknowledge its use in relation to geography and engineering, and so the physical structures that provide shelter. To these structural vulnerabilities, the volatility of governments and the private sector make access to and the security of shelter precarious everywhere.

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