COVID-19 Impacts On Third World Citizens

 

Great governments have been left shaken after the outbreak of the CoronaVirus. Hence, an important question arises on how governments with less power, especially their citizens, have been impacted and managed by these abrupt changes (Ogunleye, 2020). Coronavirus is a recent virus, and more information is yet to be discovered about it.

 

At the beginning of December 2019, the world went into a frenzy over the outbreak of an infectious and highly deadly virus to humans. COVID-19 is an illness caused by SARS-Cov-2 (Singh & Singh, 2020). SARS-CoV-2 was believed to have come from an animal and changed, making it cause illness to people. Several infectious diseases have come from birds, pigs, bats, and other animals in the prior years. It is deadly because it has caused many deaths globally and causes health problems that can be lasting for individuals who have suffered from it.

 

People have experienced symptoms within fourteen days of acquiring the virus (Rockowitz et al., 2021). When infected with the virus, they are contagious to other people for up to two days, and then the symptoms come out. During this time, they are still infectious for ten to twenty days, and this depends on their immune system and how bad the disease has affected them.

 

Workie and coauthors wrote the first article. Its title is, deciphering the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on food security, agriculture, and livelihoods: A review of the evidence from developing countries. The article aims to understand how Coronavirus affected people’s jobs and poverty levels (Workie et al., 2020). Coronavirus has affected the whole world, and this effect has mainly been felt in third-world countries whose health care systems are yet to be developed.

 

The International Monetary Fund asserts that about 650 million people live in poverty, but this number is expected to go up by 120 million because of the effects of this pandemic (Singh & Singh, 2020). One of the most significant shocks which came with Coronavirus was the loss of livelihoods for people. This means many businesses were closed while many individuals were retrenched because of the restriction of movement.

 

Measures put in place by the governments to stop the spread of COVID-19 resulted in people losing their jobs, and this was for the casual workers and those earning a daily wage in the white-collar sector. A considerable proportion of women lost their jobs during this pandemic (Workie et al., 2020). For example, data from the World Bank indicates that a developing country like Kenya, with labor participation of up to seventy-five percent, drastically fell to fifty-six percent by April 2020. Similarly, Nigeria, which is still a developing country, had 20% of its workers lose their occupations as a result of the COVID-19 and the world bank put estimates that the Corona crisis was likely to make more than 11 million Nigerians poor by the year 2022 (Egger at al., 2021).

 

This article concluded that individuals face the harsh realities of an unforetold circumstance out of people’s control. Those who had not been saving were hit the most as they were pushed into poverty much faster.

 

Safaa, 2019 and his co-researchers also began investigating how Coronavirus impacted people’s mental health during these trying times. They came up with a research paper called, Impact of Covid-19 on Mental Health. They affirm that Coronavirus has drastically increased mental issues among people in third-world countries.

 

This virus caused feelings of worry and anxiety about whether they were sick or not (Safaa et al., 2020). Those who were infected have a fear of being stigmatized while also blaming themselves for getting sick.