Inequality, Lockdown, and COVID-19: Unequal Societies Struggle to Contain the Virus

Publication: Policy Brief

There is nothing equal about COVID-19. It is now well established that poor and underprivileged social groups have absorbed most of the pandemic’s negative impact. However, the connection between COVID-19 and inequality might run even deeper.

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, one additional point of the Gini coefficient correlated with a 1.34 percentage point higher rate of weekly new infections across countries. This difference in infection rates compounds like interest every week. This means that after twenty-one weeks of the pandemic, just one additional Gini coefficient point correlates with an approximately 1/3 higher overall number of cases in a country. More equal countries might enjoy an “equality dividend” that is associated with more shock resilience during the ongoing crisis.

for every additional gini coefficient point in a country there is a 32.3% higher number of infections after 21 weeks on average. 1.34% higher weekly rate of new infections compounded over time.

“The same marginalized communities that were SARS-CoV-2 infection hotspots can also become fertile ground for the virus to develop new strains before enough people are vaccinated. In fact, inequality in the vaccine rollout, both within countries and between them, already displays a strong income-related pattern, which suggests the risk of repeating the mistake of letting inequities undermine the pandemic response.”

–Paul von Chamier, research officer at CIC

This new research from CIC sought to understand if pre-existing systemic inequities could be linked to higher COVID-19 infection rates, examining infection rates in 70 countries from mid-March 2020 through early August 2020, or what is widely seen as the first 21 weeks of the pandemic. It also studied these nations’ levels of inequality and other potential predictive variables: government efficiency (a measure indicating quality of public services and civil service capability), urban population share, share of the population over the age of 65, lockdown measures (calculated by stringency), and geographic mobility (a population’s physical movements as measured by Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports). The study tracked inequality by using the “Gini Coefficient,” a commonly used metric for measuring income inequality within nations–or, specifically, how far a country’s wealth or income distribution deviates from a completely equal distribution. Under this calculation, the higher the coefficient, the greater the income inequality within that country.

Read the full paper: Inequality, Lockdown, and COVID-19: Unequal Societies Struggle to Contain the Virus

More Resources

  • Publication: Analysis May 1, 2020 CIC Perspectives

    How Much Lockdown is Enough?

    Lockdown measures have been an integral tool in the fight against COVID-19. But they come at a high cost, given their impacts on economies, employment and incomes, education, food systems, mental health and even the potential for civil unrest. This briefing examines how countries are balancing the need for lockdown with policy measures to alleviate their effects and plans for reopening.

  • Publication: Report December 11, 2020 Inequality and Exclusion

    COVID-19 has a postcode: How urban housing and spatial inequality are shaping the COVID-19 crisis

    COVID-19 has underlined that spatial inequality is relevant—and costly—everywhere: not only in developing countries. The pandemic has exposed sharp inequalities in prosperous cities, such as New York and San Francisco, as well as in slums and informal settlements in developing countries such as Kenya and Iran. For an estimated 1.4 billion people living in informal settlements, home is crowded, inadequate, and unsafe. In the words of one observer, “[w]ith COVID-19, we are all in the same storm. We are not all in the same boat.”

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