Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Apr 23, 2020
Date Accepted: Jul 24, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Sep 2, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
COVID-19 and slums – A pandemic highlights the invisible
ABSTRACT
According to UN estimates about 1 billion persons live in slums. Due to their living conditions, slum dwellers are particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases. The current pandemic of the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 emphatically underlines this problem. The above mentioned living conditions are also a reason, why measures to contain the pandemic only work to a very limited extent in slums. Another major problem is the fact that an assignment to risk groups for severe courses of COVID-19 caused by non-communicable diseases (e.g. cardiovascular diseases) is not possible due to the poor data situation. Finally, model calculations on the spread of the pandemic are almost impossible due to the very poor data situation, as information on the population and health status of the slum dwellers is either not available at all or only for very specific regions (e.g. Nairobi). This comment underlines that one of the biggest problems with regard to the corona pandemic in the context of slums in the global south is the very poor information situation, in regard to the number of people, their living conditions and their health status.
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