The New Yorker:

In late February, Carolina González, a Venezuelan health-care worker, was summoned for a meeting near the Clinic hospital, in northern Caracas. Doctors, nurses, residents, and union leaders crowded the room. One of the doctors spoke of a deadly virus that had originated in China and was spreading rapidly around the world. The doctor said that no cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed yet in Venezuela, but the country’s ties with China were close enough that workers needed to know that it would surely reach them and their families. “Fear took hold of every one of us,” González recalled. Many people around her broke into tears. Others asked how a country where most hospitals lack running water, electricity, and soap could combat such an illness. González’s thoughts drifted away from the meeting room. She feared for her seventy-year-old mother, who suffers from hypertension; her three children, ages twenty-one, eighteen, and eleven; and her granddaughter, who has been in González’s charge since her daughter-in-law fled to Peru, in search of work. With a joint income of ten dollars per month, González and her partner support the entire family. Sheltering in place was not an option for them, nor for millions in Venezuela, a country where the poor line up outside slaughterhouses to fill buckets with cow blood, the only protein they can afford.

González, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, lives with her family in Barrio Kennedy, a slum on the capital’s southwestern edge. Spread for miles over a hilltop, the community is blanketed by red-brick shanties and narrow streets. Like many of her neighbors, González, who is in her forties, knew that a national lockdown would be impossible to comply with. “We were told that the cure to the coronavirus was isolation,” she said. “But, in a country where there is no food, no water, no light, no nothing, how are you supposed to isolate?” In mid-March, when President Nicolás Maduro ordered a lockdown, she and many other Venezuelans carried on with their normal lives. That meant going to the market every day to find whatever they could afford, if anything. Venezuela has the highest inflation rate in the world—bolivares are practically worthless, and most prices are in U.S. dollars. “A kilo of flour that today costs two hundred and ten thousand bolivares will be two hundred and fifteen thousand tomorrow,” González told me. Eggs now cost more than the monthly minimum wage, and the World Food Programme has warned of a potential famine during the coronavirus pandemic.

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