Will inequality worsen the toll of the pandemic in the U.S.?
This is part of our Coronavirus Update series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring. A Harvard public health professor warned Tuesday that the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. could rank among the world’s worst if the nation fails to take steps to ease the health and economic impacts on America’s poor, who face challenges rare among developed countries. Mary Bassett, François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights and former health commissioner of New York City, said the country’s longstanding structural inequality threatens to further complicate strategies by public health and government leaders to manage the pandemic. Bassett listed several reasons why the situation in the U.S. appears more potentially dire, including that the nation has the world’s largest prison population, often housed in densely crowded conditions; a low-income population in which health conditions that...