Slums are becoming a focal point of the Covid-19 outbreak

Published in CityMetric

For the 1.2 billion people around the world who live in densely populated slums, crowded conditions and scarce public services threaten to make the Covid-19 pandemic especially devastating.

An April study from Brookings India shows that these communities are already becoming a focal point of the pandemic. Researchers analyzed the “containment zones” that the Indian government set up in areas with Covid outbreaks, and overlaid that data with maps of slum communities. Their findings demonstrate that Covid-19 outbreaks in Mumbai, one of the world’s largest cities, are based in or near slum communities.

“The fact of the matter is that slums are being disproportionately impacted,” says Shaonlee Patranabis, research assistant at Brookings India and one of the authors of the study. “No containment zone’s epicenter was further than 800 metres from the nearest slum.”

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