The relentless scholarly activity triggered by the COVID-19 crisis has already generated a large number of journal articles and a growing number of books that shed much light on the health effects of the pandemic as well as its social and policy effects. In The Unequal Pandemic, Clare Bambra, Julia Lynch, and Katherine E. Smith draw on the early scholarship on COVID-19 to improve our understanding of health inequality in the pandemic while offering a coherent political perspective on public health, leading to a clear call for action. Focusing primarily on advanced industrial countries, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, they show how the COVID-19 pandemic is highly unequal in four main ways.
First, the “pandemic kills unequally” (XIII), as people living in certain neighborhoods and regions, members of ethno-racial minorities, and those belonging to certain occupational and income categories are more likely to die from COVID-19...
