There is a significant class dimension – and class myopia – in the way that the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown it has inspired are understood. Absent from any of this is the effect that the lockdown is having on the poor. First, class myopia. The lockdown has been accompanied by rather exotic debates about things like work from home or online shopping.

Let us be frank. These are basically concerns of business and a salaried middle class. Work from home is only being obsessed about by businesses eager to save on costs by passing them onto their employees, while those doing the working from home are lucky enough to still have a non-menial, salaried middle-class job that can be done on a computer. Or take online shopping. Here too, the class myopia is glaringly obvious. This is only for people with bank accounts, credit cards or cashless payment systems and who are able to pay Rs2,500 for a basket of vegetables delivered to their home. Question: How many poor people can afford to blow Rs2,500 on a basket of vegetables? How many banks are there online or which use cashless payment systems? Where do the 10 per cent of Mauritians too poor to open a bank account fit into all this?

It’s easy to obsess over these things and love a lockdown when your fridge is full, you can afford a weekly jaunt to the supermarket where a head of cabbage is now Rs315 a pop and the money is coming into the bank account at the end of the month. For the poor that rely on daily, informal and casualised labour, the lockdown resembles more a state of siege imposed by their own government. This difference in class perspective has also bred a strange interim ethic that has defined a new form of ‘criminality’, with the poor bearing the brunt of it (as usual). Now people seen outside during the lockdown are fined by the police and criticised for being irresponsible by legions of comfortable netizens (with full fridges, no doubt). Once again, little understanding of the class dimension of the problem is in evidence. Imagine you are poor and rely on daily, casual labour in the informal sector. Your income has gone and the government is offering a paltry Rs2,500 for half a month (that could buy one basket of vegetables online or eight heads of cabbage at the supermarket nowadays). If you’ve lost your job – via a letter in the post – you cannot go out to look for another job, and in any case, anybody that would hire you is also under lockdown. Or what about the 65 per cent of Mauritians that cannot afford to have any savings in the bank and are now asked to pay through the nose to stock up a months-long lockdown? What do you do? How many have not seen people roaming about neighbourhoods asking for food during the lockdown or selling vegetables atop a motorbike on the black market? Are they criminals? The only thing they can be blamed for is choosing to try to feed their families by skirting the law rather than legally abiding by it and starving. In the eyes of the police or the middle-class netizens obsessing about Covid-19 deaths, they are to be blamed for violating the lockdown. I don’t share that view. This is where class prejudice and health fears intersect.

Class is very much a factor here, make no mistake.

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