OPINION -- COVID-19 Exposes Deadly Inequalities

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From Khaosod English Facebook

By Pravit Rojanaphruk, Senior Staff Writer

 

It’s never a good time to be poor, or an ordinary person with no connections. When there’s a COVID-19 outbreak, it could quickly become fatal. Your chance of dying, if infected, is much higher than the rich and well-connected that will in no time be taken to a plush hospital.

At Klong Toey Slum, Thailand’s largest shanty town, 50 people have been infected by midweek. Many called for a field hospital bed in vain. No field hospital beds were available for most of them.

They had to wait and they ended up having to quarantine themselves inside their tiny and over-crowded homes, often with many other family members who shared the space and exposed the rest to the risk of infections, until an ad hoc space was set at a temple inside the community on Thursday.

“It’s very congested. It’s like being imprisoned at home,” Prateep Ungsongtham Hata, founder of Klong Toey-based Duang Prateep Foundation told me earlier this week about the situation.

You don’t need to be a slum dweller to be more acutely vulnerable.

Half a dozen ordinary people called the government COVID-19 hotline 1668 in vain over the past 10 days. They died before or as help arrived. Some of these people died a lonely death. They called and called and called but the hotline was busy, busy and busy. When help came, it came too late.

Political artist Sina Wittayawiroj even made a parody out of Jacques-Louis David’s famous 1793 painting, “The Death of Marat” about the situation. Instead of French Revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, it’s an anonymous ordinary Thai male lying on a bed with the same posture, dead. His left hand holding on to a smartphone after failing to get help from the government’s hotline centre, the word “HELP” was written on the floor.

https://www.khaosodenglish.com/opinion/2021/05/02/opinion-covid-19-exposes-deadly-inequalities-in-thailand/