Introduction

On March 17, 2020, the first death from COVID-19 in Brazil was officially confirmed in Rio de Janeiro. The victim, a 63-year-old domestic worker, contracted COVID-19 from her employer, who had just returned from a trip to Italy. A resident of Miguel Pereira, a small town in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the victim took two buses and a train to cover the 120 km that separated her residence from her workplace, in the Leblon neighborhood, which holds the title of the ‘most expensive square meter in the country’. Due to the distance between the two places, the housekeeper ‘lived’ at her employer's house from Sunday to Thursday. Despite suffering from obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and urinary tract infection, she had to go on working, as she needed the money to help her family.

The first COVID-19 death in Rio de Janeiro is the perfect synthesis of the spread of COVID-19 in Brazil, a country where the virus's lethality is higher among low-income populations, which typically face the more precarious labor, poor housing conditions, and urban mobility problems (see Rocco et al, Volume 1). Facing the need to keep the Brazilian population at home in the seventh most unequal country in the world, this rich-poor gap proves to be extremely perverse to Black and/or poor populations, particularly those living in Brazilian favelas. Considering this context, this chapter aims to explore how the social conditions experienced by Black and/or poor people make the pandemic harsher for these groups.

This chapter is underpinned by the following arguments. First, urban mobility challenges are seriously affecting poor residents on the city's outskirts, as public transportation systems are precarious and insufficient, inducing agglomeration of commuters. Second, the flexibilization of labor laws has aggravated the COVID-19 pandemic as the state has failed to fulfill its mediation role between employer and employee. This places extra pressure on employees to keep working during the pandemic. Third, COVID-19 has been worsened by the state's absence in poor neighborhoods, as noted in favelas, where drug dealers and militias formed by police officers control the supply of basic services and mediate commercial transactions. Fourth, the lack of basic sanitation and substandard housing conditions hamper the cleanliness and personal hygiene necessary to avoid the spread of COVID-19.