The rich infected the poor as COVID-19 spread around the world

SINGAPORE — When it arrived in the unforgiving industrial towns of central Mexico, the sand-swept sprawl of northern Nigeria and the mazes of metal shanties in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, COVID-19 went by another name.

People called it a “rich man’s disease.”

Pandemics throughout history have been associated with the underprivileged, but in many developing countries the coronavirus was a high-class import — carried in by travelers returning from business trips in China, studies in Europe, ski vacations in the Rockies.

As infections initially concentrated in better neighborhoods, many poor and working-class people believed the disease wouldn’t touch them, as if something terrible but rarefied. The misperception was fed by elites, including the governor of Mexico’s Puebla state, Luis Miguel Barbosa, who said in March: “If you’re rich, you’re at risk, but if you’re poor, you’re not. The poor, we’re immune.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-rich-infected-the-poor-as-covid-19-spread-around-the-world/ar-BB13UO0l?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout