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COVID has badly affected wealthy nations, what will it do to poor ones and how can they stop it with their limited means?

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  1. Kuromantis
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    These days, Teresa buys food that doesn’t need to go in the fridge. Hers broke, after a series of power outages finally wrecked its circuitry. When she can afford to buy meat, she resorts to a bygone technique—preserving it with salt. It’s a burden her family has gotten used to. Others are harder to make peace with: Teresa’s 8-year-old, Sara, has autism and epilepsy, and just one box of the anticonvulsant pills she needs costs $70, a hefty sum for a public-school teacher who makes barely $6 a month.

    In mid-March, with just a few dozen confirmed cases of COVID-19, Venezuelan authorities opted for a strong response. Citizens were ordered to stay home and to wear masks if they went outside. By April, some communities had added a curfew, and several others began allowing only individual family members out at a time. The military has been deployed nationwide to enforce the new controls. Though Teresa—who asked to be identified with a pseudonym, fearing retribution for speaking out—and her husband, also a public-school teacher, are still being paid, they cannot go to work and have been unable to purchase any of the medication Sara needs.

    For one, the benefits of imposing the prevention measures first implemented by developed ones—such as extensive lockdowns—are anything but clear. Poorer countries lack the resources to offer the economic and social rescue packages that richer states, such as those in Europe and North America, have extended to their citizens. These countries are also home to hundreds of millions of informal or self-employed workers, who typically have little in the way of savings and need to venture out for money and food.

    Lockdowns can thus create considerable desperation, forcing people to ignore them—sometimes at the risk of antagonizing the state. In Nairobi, Kenya, soldiers shot people who were out in the streets. In Peru, defying government restrictions can lead to jail terms of up to three years. Police in India were criticized in the early stages of that country’s lockdown for punishing day laborers who, lacking a place to stay or the funds to survive, walked the often long distances back to their home villages.

    Most concerning of all, however, is the fragility of health-care systems throughout the developing world. The Central African Republic, a country of 5 million, has only three ventilators. Somalia has just one intensive-care bed for every million citizens. In Venezuela, the situation was similarly abject even before the dangers of a pandemic came into view. A survey last year found that 70 percent of hospitals in the country receive water only once or twice a week, while a fifth operate with no water at all. Reports have consistently put the number of ICU beds around 80 nationwide. Last year, the president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation said that more than half of the country’s doctors had emigrated.

    In March, Francesco Checchi, an epidemiology and international-health professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, co-wrote a study on a series of realistic preventive measures that could be taken against the coronavirus in low-income settings. Among them was the recommendation that high-risk members of society—including the elderly—be isolated while household breadwinners continue going to work.

    It’s “not lives versus economy,” Checchi cautioned during our conversation. “It’s lives versus lives. You can save lives through a lockdown, but you will also potentially cause a lot of indirect mortality because of the lockdown, immediately or down the line.”