THE coronavirus pandemic has exposed the many faces of poverty, especially in urban areas. It also exposes what seems to be the limited knowledge the government has of poverty. Because of this deficiency, the solutions it proposes to address the problem are also suspect.
News reports, accompanied by video footage, about the urban poor being arrested for staying out of their homes and therefore repeatedly violating enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) rules (mga pasaway, as social media comments put it), have become common. There are reports that go deeper than usual, enabling us to see the squalid subhuman conditions under which many of them live, like families of five compressing themselves inside a 5-cubic-meter room that serves as multipurpose dining, living, kitchen and bedroom facilities. For the well-off, it can be quite surprising that, having been stereotyped as “rowdy squatters,” the breadwinning members of some of these families are government employees like Metro Manila Development Authority enforcers, public school teachers and, yes, government nurses.
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