COVID‐19 Has Exposed How ‘The Other Half’ (Still) Lives

Socioeconomic factors are heavily shaping the COVID‐19 pandemic in South America. Consequently, societies are now facing the stark effects of lockdown, while largely failing to stop the epidemic. In Chile, this has been amplified by decision‐makers who have overlooked critical socio‐spatial aspects of the epidemic. Precarious living conditions, together with spatial segregation and unstable domestic economies, help explain why mitigation strategies remain unsuccessful. The article also explores how political frameworks for approaching these issues may change because of the pandemic.

On 22 May 2020, the WHO declared South America the new epicentre of the COVID‐19 pandemic (Taylor, 2020). By then, more than 5.5 million cases and about 340,000 deaths had been reported globally (Dong, Du and Gardner, 2020), disrupting societies and health systems (Burki, 2020; Lloyd‐Sherlock et al., 2020; World Bank, 2020). Governments in South America were relatively quick to respond after the first COVID‐19 case was reported on 25 February in São Paulo, Brazil (Rodriguez‐Morales et al., 2020). A few weeks later, most countries in the region had imposed major epidemic control measures, including travel restrictions, entry bans, closure of schools, and mandatory lockdowns (Burki, 2020). Despite these measures, the pandemic has taken a large toll in South America, with more than a million coronavirus infections by mid‐June, and thousands of casualties in Brazil (42,720), Peru (6498), Ecuador (3874), and Chile (3323) (Dong, Du and Gardner, 2020). Consequently, most countries in the continent have been facing the stark consequences of epidemic control measures, while largely failing to stop the spread of the virus (Dong, Du and Gardner, 2020; Navarro et al., 2020).

Besides poorly funded and fragmented healthcare systems, explanatory factors include struggling economies and ongoing sociopolitical crises, precarious living conditions, inadequate sanitation infrastructure, and vast socioeconomic inequalities (The Lancet, 2019; Burki, 2020; Kirby, 2020; World Bank, 2020). These structural issues not only help explain the limited effects of mitigation strategies but have intensified the impact of the pandemic (Abrams and Szefler, 2020; Ahmed et al., 2020; Oliveira and Arantes, 2020). We use Chile as a case study to illustrate how socio‐spatial inequalities are heavily shaping the pandemic, amplified by the fact that decision‐makers have failed to take these inequalities and marginalised livelihoods into account.