This article interrogates the necropolitical landscape of COVID-19 in Nigeria. The article explores how the landscape emerges at the intersection of COVID-19 regime and structural violence and materializes in foodscapes and waterscapes of the country. It, also, analyzes ethical quandaries arising as the brutal violence of the regime is amplified by structural violence in places and spaces of residence, recreation, leisure and labor of ordinary people. Using qualitative data derived from primary and secondary sources, the article demonstrates that the necropolitical landscape reconfigures social relationships, meanings and identities embedded in places and spaces where people interact with each other and with food and water to produce youth's violent resistance as well as varnishing foodscapes and waterscapes. These changes ultimately impose the status of a living-dead on ordinary people in Nigeria. The article concludes that without the provision of adequate palliative, devoid of food fraud, geography of corruption, gender and ethnic-biases to every citizen, the government loses its moral ground to implement its COVID-19 regime. To meet the gap between what Nigeria can afford and what is required to implement the regime, both the government and its financial elites must embrace economic justice. Finally, the government should opt for a modified regime that factors the extant material conditions of the have-nots into the arrangement.
The new and prevailing Corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic is an extremely contagious virus. Scientific research has gone far in the study and treatment of the virus. One of the things known about it at present is that its spread depends on social contact. In this paper, I consider the challenge that allocation of scarce medical resources poses in the fight against COVID-19. Millions have been infected, just as the number of diseased also runs in thousands. The allocation of scarce medical resources during the COVID-19 pandemic regime poses a challenge to healthcare providers. In attempting to save the lives of COVID-19 patients, how should we allocate ventilators or vaccines? Since ventilators, or as at present vaccines, are scarce compared to the number of patients that need it for survival, who should get one? To address this challenge, healthcare providers often resort to triage, especially in Emergency Departments (EDs) and intensive care units (ICUs). In this paper, I discuss the possibilities, limits, and complexities associated with the principle of triage in the distribution of scarce medical resources in the treatment and attempt to save the lives of COVID-19 patients. I contend that triage as a principle of distribution of scarce health resources fails in the distribution of scarce life-saving resources to COVID-19 patients. I aim to show that the triage protocol approach fails in terms of clinical and non-clinical evidence as well as regarding procedural issues associated with its application.
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