The Covid-19 pandemic in low- and middle-income countries, who carries the burden? Review of mass media and publications from six countries

ABSTRACT

During the Covid-19 pandemic, rich countries employed lockdown and physical distancing policies for transmission control. However, the question still remains whether these measures are also suitable in countries with a fragile economy, which rests mainly on the informal sector. The impacts of lockdown measures in disadvantaged population strata in six low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were reviewed using i) 93 media reports and ii) 17 published scientific papers. This review showed that those who suffered the most from the lockdown were migrants, workers in the large informal sector, small businesses, slum dwellers, women and elderly, revealing the social, cultural and economic inequalities of societies. Financial and food support for the poor was inadequate and sometimes mismanaged. In the better organized societies, the resilience was stronger (South Korea, Kerala/India) but here also the poor had to suffer the most. It is strongly recommended that outbreak response strategies should particularly focus on the poor and vulnerable population.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• corona virus
• low- and middle-income countries
• socio-economic impact

Declarations

Authors’ contributions

DJC, AAA, SYJ, JV, AJ, MRB, PA, RCS, MAC, JMV and SDM collected the of Newspaper articles. TRR, AK and MAC conducted the systematic literature review. DJC, AAA and SYJ prepared the spread sheets. DJC, AAA and AK wrote the text with contributions from all authors. All authors contributed to the interpretation of mass media reports, and reviewed and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to Eduardo Alfonso Sierra (Colombia), Hyemin Park (South Korea), Martin Anto (India), Professor In-Hwan Oh (South Korea), Ronald Skewes Ramm (Dominican Republic), and Dr. Arun Padmanandan (India) for contributing information and supporting the study.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessedhere.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available as supplementary material in the Synapse repository, https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn22111631.