Never let a crisis go to waste especially if race can be inserted. Xi is a very rich guy!

How coronavirus — a 'rich man's disease' — infected the poor

Shashank Bengali, Kate Linthicum, Victoria Kim

,

LA Times•May 8, 2020

A Kenyan health worker uses a nasal swab to test a man for COVID-19 in the Kawangware slums of the capital, Nairobi. (Luis Tato / AFP/Getty Images)

When it arrived in the unforgiving industrial towns of central Mexico, the sand-swept sprawl of northern Nigeria and the mazes of metal shanties in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, COVID-19 went by another name.

People called it a “rich man’s disease.”

Pandemics throughout history have been associated with the underprivileged, but in many developing countries the coronavirus was a high-class import — carried in by travelers returning from business trips in China, studies in Europe, ski vacations in the Rockies.

As infections initially concentrated in better neighborhoods, many poor and working-class people believed the disease wouldn’t touch them, as if something terrible but rarefied. The misperception was fed by elites, including the governor of Mexico’s Puebla state, Luis Miguel Barbosa, who said in March: “If you’re rich, you’re at risk, but if you’re poor, you’re not. The poor, we’re immune.”

By now it is clear that COVID-19 spares no one and disproportionately harms the hungry, the forgotten, those with preexisting illnesses and substandard health care.

But historians say it may be remembered as the first pandemic that spread, to a significant extent, from the affluent to the lowly — agitating class grievances in some of the world’s most unequal societies and adding a dark twist to a pandemic that has killed more than 270,000 people.

A lineup for charity food distribution in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Tuesday. (Marco Longari / AFP/Getty Images)

“At the very, very early stages it could be considered a rich man’s disease," said Joshua Loomis, an assistant professor of biology at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania and author of a history of epidemics. "But as we know, it didn’t take long to become entrenched among the poor, and that is where most pandemics gravitate.”

The rich have long erected barriers to insulate themselves — whether walls to hide slums in India or the gated communities and private jets favored among the wealthy in the United States. The well-off have been refining social distancing for years, and when contagion appears, societies’ first instinct has often been to target and sequester the poor.

Story continues