You might think that diseases are apolitical, after all diseases don’t discriminate but their effects can be categorised quite neatly according to class. So, in this week’s post I’m going to try to explain a few ways in which large-scale disease outbreaks like the one currently going on in China’s Hubei province can affect people differently depending on socio-economic status.
The first, and by far most obvious, point I want to discuss is general health. Living a healthy life is expensive and the wealthier one is the easier it is to access healthy food, clean air, regular exercise and medicine. This might not be a problem in many developed economies in western Europe, north America or north east Asia but China is on the whole a middle-income country. This is of course not directly tied to disease outbreaks but one’s susceptibility and chances of recovery are determined by one’s general health, and one’s class determines one’s ability to lead a healthy life.
In China there have been Western firms which have decided to close down operations until the virus outbreak is over, for example H&M and Ikea have closed down their shops. This is bad for those who work in retail and outbreaks are bad for retail even in cases less drastic than shops closing. If one becomes aware of an epidemic it makes sense to try to stay at home in order to try to reduce the risk of contamination which when a lot of people think that way is bad for retail when fewer people go shopping unless they have to. There’s an additional layer to this as those who worked in retail who no longer have a job until the outbreak is over will have a lower income making it more difficult for them to afford a healthy lifestyle which puts them at greater risk of catching the virus.
In contrast, white collar professions typically don’t involve interacting with lots of new people every day which makes it possible to continue operations as before without putting workers at risk. This applies to most upper-middle class jobs whereas a lot of working and lower-middle class jobs are the service industry where the risk of infection is high or are in industry where there’s typically a lot of workers in a fairly small area which also increases the risk of infection. This makes those who are well off much more likely to continue to be well off whereas those who aren’t can in some cases lose work and therefore income due to the disease.
What do you think, will the Wuhan epidemic turn out to be overblown or is it a global catastrophe in the making? I’d love to hear your thoughts! If you liked this post you can read last week’s post here, and come back next week for a new post!
Written by Karl Johansson
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