Premium
Preventing COVID‐19 Amid Public Health and Urban Planning Failures in Slums of Indian Cities
Author(s) -
Patel Amit
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
world medical and health policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.326
H-Index - 11
ISSN - 1948-4682
DOI - 10.1002/wmh3.351
Subject(s) - overcrowding , slum , sanitation , sustenance , pandemic , public health , context (archaeology) , livelihood , economic growth , business , urbanization , environmental planning , environmental health , socioeconomics , geography , political science , covid-19 , medicine , sociology , economics , population , agriculture , nursing , disease , archaeology , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law
The COVID‐19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to the lack of urban planning and its public health implications in developing countries. Slum communities face the dual challenges of chronically poor residential environments and the acute effects of a pandemic and the preventive measures that follow. In this paper, I assess the effectiveness and implications of social distancing, frequent handwashing, and lockdown in the context of slums in Indian cities, where overcrowding, lack of access to water and sanitation, and dependence on daily wages for sustenance and livelihood are common. Using data from multiple sources, I demonstrate that not only will these measures be hard to achieve in slums in the short term due to specific characteristics of these habitats, but they will bring new challenges in the long term due to disproportionate impacts on the urban poor. Lessons learned from this pandemic will require us to rethink public health responses and urban planning practices that could better prepare our cities for future pandemics.