The coronavirus, so tiny, has come to make explicit what has been in front of us for a long time and which, because it has become so commonplace, has become a situation with which we have learned to live: social inequality.
How do you impose social distancing, isolation, quarantine, any of these terms that we are now becoming familiar with as the virus spreads across the country, on residents of a favela? How do you ask a doorman to work from home? How do you tell people who live in cramped cubicles to isolate the infected patient in a room so as not to contaminate others?
Covid-19 arrived in Brazil in the luggage of the wealthiest. It did not emerge from forgotten water basins in backyards or vacant lots, like dengue fever. It does not carry within itself the DNA of the economically disadvantaged. It will not be aggravated in Brazil by the lack of health care that brings us other ills, but rather by the lack of infrastructure, education, personal hygiene and collective awareness.
Problems that have been neglected in recent decades are becoming clearer now. The vulnerability of the population living in substandard housing, without running water or sewage, who travel cramped on public transport and are accustomed to facing long lines to receive care in the health system, will be highlighted in the news in the coming weeks as never before.
In this context, the importance of universal sanitation is highlighted, as a basic condition for correct hygiene care, but also the advantages of the Unified Health System (SUS).
In the coming weeks or months, Brazilian companies will have to rethink not only their way of working, allowing employees to work from home, but also review a series of processes, following the example of their peers in other countries.
By being connected, we can continue our work remotely and use technology to our advantage, communicating risks and prevention more quickly. As we are globalized, we are spreading and infecting more people than ever before, and we are feeling the economic effects of a global recession, affected by interconnected stock markets.
In addition to the prevention measures already known, we see wonderful examples of people offering to do shopping for the elderly, among many other exemplary examples of solidarity. We are also seeing awareness coming from companies.
Alternating shifts, employees working from home or even the complete suspension of production lines (with guaranteed job maintenance) are some of the measures we have seen adopted here and in other countries.
Pay TV channels were opened to be more accessible to the entire population, telephone companies guaranteed to expand the signal to better serve overloaded residential areas.
In Brazil, Banco do Brasil, Caixa and BNDES are settling the debts of small companies and creating new lines of credit. Elderly employees in several companies are being furloughed and some companies are already paying for private transportation for essential employees to go to work. Some of our companies are allocating their production lines to the manufacture of masks and hand sanitizer, and Vale has even ordered millions of coronavirus validation tests from China to administer to the population.
The coronavirus highlights the interdependence and collaboration we need to overcome our main challenges. It makes it clear that the most vulnerable part of society will always be the biggest victims of fatalities. Without populism, integrating production systems, acting collectively, tackling problems head on and putting the systemic fight against social inequality into a business perspective, I am certain that we will emerge from this long quarantine bigger and better.
Text originally published in Sheet.
