Editorial | COVID-19 downtown hotspots and urban fixing decay

Parris Lyew-Ayee Jr’s analysis of the communities at greatest risk for the spread of COVID-19 essentially confirms what most Jamaicans know instinctively. That is, most of the hotspots are in the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA), and the hottest of the hot are south of Cross Roads, which is to say, in downtown Kingston.

In a sense, the findings by Dr Lyew-Ayee, the head of the Mona Geoinformatics Institute at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, though not fully congruent, are similar to what is emerging in the United States, where COVID-19 is infecting, and killing, black and brown people at disproportionately high rates. In Jamaica, and the United States, the correlation is poverty and poor living conditions.

Jamaica’s first order of business, which is why the Government commissioned Dr Lyew-Ayee’s analysis, must be to slow and, ultimately, halt the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory tract disease to which older people and persons with underlying health conditions are particularly vulnerable. But even as the authorities confront COVID-19’s immediate threat, the potential geographic arc of the disease in Jamaica is another indisputable signal of the urgency of inner-city renewal, for which this newspaper has long advocated.

In his presentation to Parliament’s COVID-19 committee, Dr Lyew-Ayee pointed out that on both his vulnerability and risk indices, the highest scores were in the KMA, which comprises the administrative region of Kingston and St Andrew and parts of the parish of St Catherine.

With regard to vulnerability, which assesses issues such as population density, age, underlying health issues, levels of poverty, and a community’s proximity to health facilities, Dr Lyew-Ayee’s index carries a maximum score of 75. The highest/worst score by any community was 60 – by eight of them, all of which are in the KMA. Of the 50 most vulnerable communities, only four are outside of the KMA; two each in the eastern parish of Portland; and St James, in the northwest.

When these issues are refined further into a risk analysis that considers factors of vulnerability, including the real hazard of exposure, against a community’s adaptive capacity, the maximum, or worst score, on the index is 39. The highest, or worst score, was 29, by six communities.

‘Below the clock’

Except for the Whitehall area in northern St Andrew, all, as Dr Lyew-Ayee’s PowerPoint notes put it, are “below the clock”, which is south of Cross Roads Square, which Jamaicans in the capital often use as an anecdotal reference of the city’s greatest concentration of poverty, criminal violence, and social dislocation, where certain classes of people don’t linger.

Of course, there are other communities in the KMA with high levels of poverty and criminality. Downtown, however, is a relatively small and tight area, with swathes of communities where thousands of people live cheek-and-jowl in tenements, with limited access to sanitary facilities, making it difficult to practise the recommended hygiene for fighting COVID-19. Overcrowding also affects people’s ability to follow the suggested physical-distancing rules to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

In other words, these symptoms of poverty, including limited access to quality healthcare, are, broadly, similar to what obtain among African Americans in the USA in a state such as Michigan, where they make up 14 per cent of the population but account for 33 per cent of its COVID-19 cases and 41 per cent of its deaths. Or Louisiana, where blacks are 32 per cent of the population, but, so far, account for 70 per cent of the COVID-19-related deaths.

Race, at least not in the sense of the United States, isn’t the determining factor for the high-risk communities identified by Dr Lyew-Ayee. Here, it is primarily, among other things, poverty and abysmal living conditions. This newspaper has consistently suggested that rather than allocating resources to new cities, such as the one planned for the Bernard Lodge estate, on, according to the Government’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), Jamaica’s “most fertile … A1 soil”, there ought to be a massive assault on the country’s slums, starting with those in Kingston, which share the advantage of, though rundown, basic infrastructure like roads, water, and some rehabilitable homes.

In some instances, people lack titles to property, and most can’t afford the cost of upgrading their homes. But we continue to insist that it can’t be beyond the capacity of Jamaica’s policymakers to design programmes that leverage the assets of government agencies, such as the National Housing Trust and the National Land Agency, and match these against private-sector resources, and community inputs, including sweat equity, to deliver urban renewal in which existing residents have a real stake.

The Government and the political directorate have talked about addressing the problem of shelter and squatting that cause up to a third of the population to live in informal communities. COVID-19 is another sounding of the clarion to the urgency of the matter.