1636 Jo Shaw economic consequences. While the approach is not strictly comparative, the article draws on examples to be found in many different countries, reflecting the global nature of the pandemic.1 For a brief moment, it was suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic could be a great “leveler.”2 SARS-COV-2 is a novel virus in humans to which all could be susceptible. In fact, from the inception of the pandemic, it quickly emerged that the impacts upon humans of the virus, of the disease to which it gives rise, and of the measures that are taken to control its spread are uneven and are conditioned by a variety of physical and social vectors. These include age, socio-economic status, disability, presence of co-morbidities (including ones which are strongly correlated with poverty such as obesity and various heart and pulmonary diseases), race, and ethnic origin. Roshni Chakraborty and Jacqueline Bhabha make the point in these terms:3 Far from being “great equalizers,” diseases reflect and reinforce preexisting hierarchies. Structural inequalities in wealth, housing, health care, employment, and social capital place the poor and the socially vulnerable at a higher risk of infection and death. At the same time, the fear and suspicion engendered by epidemics exacerbate the vulnerabilities of those perceived as “other” or “outsider”, populations whose survival and dignity are already compromised by social exclusion mechanisms such as legal invisibility, geographic ghettoization, and social ostracism. Take the case of Black and minority ethnic (“BAME”) communities in the Global North.4 Members of these groups are heavily represented within “frontline worker” roles exposed to increased infection risk, often without effective protective equipment. Infection with the virus amongst these groups seems more likely to lead to severe disease and mortality. Finally, the socio-economic consequences of economic shutdowns or “lockdowns” are inevitably more serious within communities which have already been negatively impacted by the long tail of the great recession at the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, and the austerity which was a dominant political and economic response to that crisis.5 Once again, BAME individuals are overrepresented within these groups in many countries, and these groups will feel the sting of 1 The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to an unprecedented data gathering exercise across many domains, including law and policy, as well as a number of “rapid reaction” collections of articles based on national reports. Databases of legal and policy measures include: (1) COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, UNIV. OXFORD, https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/ covid-19-government-response-tracker; Thomas Hale, Noam Angrist, Refael Goldszmidt, Beatriz Kira, Anna Petherick, Toby Philips, Samuel Webster, Emily Cameron-Blake, Laura Hallas, Saptarshi Majumdar, & Helen Tatlow, A Global Panel Database of Pandemic Policies (Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker), 5 NATURE HUM. BEHAV. 529 (2021), https://www. nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01079-8; (2) CoronaNet Research Project, PERISCOPE CONSORTIUM, https://www.coronanetproject.org; Cindy Cheng, Joan Barcelo, Allison Spencer Hartnett, Robert Kuinec, & Luca Messerschmidt, COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet v.1.0), 4 NATURE HUM. BEHAV. 756 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562020-0909-7; and (3) COVID-19 Law Lab, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, https://covidlawlab.org. See “rapid reaction” surveys of legislative and regulatory responses to the COVID-19 pandemic like UCL, Oxford Compendium of Nat’l Legal Responses to Covid-19, https://lexatlas-c19.org, and materials published on the Verfassungsblog in 2020 and 2021. For a 2021 summary, see Joelle Grogan, Power, Law and the COVID-19 Pandemic – Part II: Preparing for Future Emergencies, VERFBLOG (May 15, 2021), https://verfassungsblog.de/power-law-and-the-covid-19-pandemic-part-ii. 2 To understand the truly global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic as public health emergency (cases, deaths, vaccines, etc.) it is possible to consult one of several data repositories, such as Our World in Data, GLOBAL CHANGE DATA LAB, https:// ourworldindata.org/coronavirus, or Coronavirus Data Res. Ctr., JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV. & MED., https://coronavirus.jhu. edu. For a library of COVID-19 trackers, see COVID19 Trackers Library, https://dbhatedin.github.io/CuratedTrackersLibrary. 3 Roshni Chakraborty & Jacqueline Bhabha, Fault Lines of Refugee Exclusion: Statelessness, Gender, and COVID-19 in South Asia, 23 HEALTH & HUM. RTS. J. 237, 238 (2021). 4 For a review of the available literature, see Peter Phiri, Gayathri Delanerolle, Ayaat Al-Sudani, & Shanaya Rathod, COVID-19 and Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic Communities: A Complex Relationship Without Just Cause, 7 J. MED. INTERNET RES. PUB. HEALTH SURVEILLANCE e22581 (Feb. 2021), https://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/2/e22581. 5 Zoë Irving, The Legacy of Austerity, 20 SOC. POL’Y AND SOC’Y 97-110 (2021); UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Hum. Rights, Looking Back to Look Ahead: A Rights-based Approach to Social Protection in the Post-COVID-19 Economic Recovery (Sept. 11, 2020), https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Poverty/covid19.pdf. https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press