As Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fight for the title of richest man alive, the world’s poor are getting poorer and poorer. Although the pandemic caught us all off guard, the extreme inequalities that arose from it were predictable, and yet not many cared enough to try and prevent these from worsening the situation.
The issue of income inequality is hard for us, as privileged individuals, to grasp in all of its complexities, but many of us have gained a new understanding of this concept, whether it's by watching the many news reports from home, or from walking the streets of our own cities during the health crisis.
Here in Milan, unemployment has soared, leaving many families struggling to put food on the table or just to make it to the end of the month. The volunteers at Pane Quotidiano, an NGO which serves meals in Viale Tibaldi, saw a 10% increase in people coming for food, especially during the winter holidays. Check out this video to see what the lines looked like. But these issues are not unique to Milan or to Italy. The World Economic Forum estimates that the pandemic may have pushed over 100 million more people into extreme poverty, with acute hunger doubling to 260 million people in 2020.
Tied with income inequality, the pandemic has also shed light on unequal access to opportunities in education. NPR journalist Cory Turner, who has been covering education for years, argued that the education system was always deeply inequitable, with black and Hispanic communities having to attend poorly funded schools and with low access to educational opportunities. In an interview, Turner stated that “there's also a digital divide, which has always been there” but which mattered less because schools were held in person. Now, low-income students have also been burdened with little to no access to technology or stable internet access: core requirements for online learning during the pandemic.
Perhaps more than anything, the pandemic has placed a magnifying glass over the fault lines in healthcare systems across the globe. In the USA, a country relying heavily on private health insurance, many Americans have entered what is probably the worst health crisis in their lifetime, with no guaranteed access to healthcare or treatment. Even a simple Covid-19 diagnostic test in New York City can cost over 150 dollars, and many find themselves unable to afford the one test that can help them protect the people around them.
The UN and many other national and international organizations are actively working and discussing solutions to the inequalities that have been plaguing our world, just after the pandemic has highlighted the ubiquity and severity of these issues, but there is still much to be done.
It’s sad to think that it took a pandemic to expose the deep inequalities within our societies, but maybe we can take this as a wake-up call, one that will finally make us realize our privilege and start producing change, so as to help out those whose rights to education, healthcare, food and housing are constantly hanging by a thread.