Why social distancing won't work for us - The Correspondent - 0 views
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My family and I live in Lagos, Nigeria, a tightly packed city with a land mass of only 1,171 sq kilometre and a population anywhere between 15 and 22 million, depending on who you ask. If New York never sleeps because the lights are always on and there’s always somewhere to be, Lagos never sleeps because there’s no power, it’s much too hot indoors and you might as well have a good time while you’re out trying to catch a breeze. Going by the dictionary definition of the word "slum" - "a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people" - my home city is the largest one in the world. And across my continent, more than 200 million people live in one.
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Sourcing water is arduous and expensive, so people are unlikely to prioritise frequent hand-washing. Public transportation consists mostly of privately owned vehicles in which intense proximity is inevitable.
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Street trading and open-air markets are such a fundamental part of the fabric of Lagos that we joke that you could leave home in just your underwear and arrive at your destination fully dressed
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The cost of living in Lagos is also very high, which means that home ownership is the exception for Lagosians rather than the rule. The majority of renters live in extremely close quarters, in a kind of private proximity that mirrors the density of public life.
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In my city, grimy currency notes go from hand to hand throughout the course of everyday life. People sweat on one another in transit. Communal toilets, kitchens and bathrooms are typical in low-income neighbourhoods, and can be shared by as many as 40 people in one building. In the poorest neighbourhoods, sanitation is non-existent because neither piped water nor sewage management systems are available.
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there are other threats more real and more immediate than a respiratory infection which has so far tended to kill old people in faraway places most of us will only ever see on TV. The idea of social distancing is not just alien to us, it is impossible for social and economic reasons too. Cities such as Lagos are kept alive by the kind of interpersonal interaction that the global north is currently discouraging or criminalising.
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For such people, the possibility of catching a previously unheard-of illness is a far less dangerous one than the knowledge that not having anything to eat is always a sunrise away.
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If rape and torture are not enough to deter people from leaving home every day to try to make some money to survive, a novel coronavirus outbreak is not likely to succeed either
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In Nigeria, it won’t matter whether we get 20,000 cases all at once or over the course of a few months; with fewer than 500 ventilators for a population of 200 million,
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In all likelihood, the social expectation that female relatives will care for the sick and dying will hold sway in this outbreak, which means that in the immediate term, girls and women may be at disproportionate risk of infection and re-infection. Still, as 80% of coronavirus patients report mild to moderate symptoms,
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The failures of the government have been mitigated by the fact that we are socialised to see to the wellbeing of our communities and their members; this has been a workable solution until now.
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a reality that is extremely widespread across Africa: people survive difficulty by coming together as communities of care, not pulling apart in a retreat into individualism.
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It’s time for us Africans to start thinking about solutions that are not based on the legitimate fears of other nations, but on our own established realities.