When the first cases of COVID began to spread around the world in early 2020, people in Iquitos, a remote city in the Peruvian Amazon, weren’t unduly worried. They assumed their isolation would protect them. It didn’t. Peru, and Iquitos, were hit fast and hard.
In many wealthier parts of the world, states stepped in to help people whose livelihoods had disappeared. Not in Iquitos. The pandemic led to an extreme case of societal breakdown. In a surreal situation, people were left to fend for themselves, fighting to get hold of oxygen on the black market for their loved ones and forced to put themselves in danger to survive.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to a researcher who spent a year living in Iquitos, trying to understand what happened there during the pandemic. It serves as a warning that even after facing multiple crises, five years later, few places are ready for the radical reckoning needed to avoid the same thing happening again.
