Inequality and the pandemic.

Byline: Umair Javed

IN a piece published on Dawn.com last week, distinguished academics Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Benjamin Daniels revealed the long-term health and educational impact on children who lived through the October 2005 earthquake in the north of the country. The results make for grim reading. As they report, 'children close to the fault line who were in utero at the time of the earthquake are three centimetres shorter than those who lived farther away, and although this disadvantage narrows for children who were older, it does not disappear unless they were three years or older at the time of the earthquake.'

On educational outcomes, the research is similarly worrying: 'at every age, children who lived closer to the fault line were doing worse than those who lived farther away. These gaps were large and represented the learning-equivalent of around two years of schooling (or 0.4 SD) on average at all schoolgoing ages. Consequently, a child who was in Grade 2 and living close to the earthquake scored as well on our tests as a child living far from the earthquake in Grade 4.'

The piece is couched within a broader discussion of the adverse long-term consequences of major crises, such as an earthquake or a pandemic. Damage to physical infrastructure and economic growth are usually the first two things that states identify and attempt to fix. Other outcomes, those that are less obvious, such as health and educational impact, tend to slip below the radar of state visibility and thus may go unaddressed.

How this pandemic will impact life and society beyond headline economic growth outcomes is unclear at this point. Unlike an earthquake, there is no demarcated area and fault line that can be leveraged to compare differential consequences in issues like health, education, infrastructure and livelihoods. The consequences are both global, and profoundly localised and contingent on unknown variables simultaneously.

Covid-19, contrary to being some great leveller, actually magnifies some distinctions.

However, there are some axes of differentiation that are already becoming visible. Access to health facilities, testing, and isolation is unequally distributed based on geography and social class status. This is the immediate public health concern that states the world over are attempting to address. From a longer-term perspective, the nature of recovery for corona-afflicted patients is also going to be different based on location and...