RESUMEN
The UK government's Everyone In scheme, announced in March 2020, required local authorities to temporarily house all homeless individuals in their area regardless of immigration status. In providing support through safe and secure accommodation, Everyone In also provided a crucial moment of visibility for migrants experiencing homelessness. Yet, just as it provided life-changing opportunities for some, the scheme was not straightforwardly a celebratory moment for migrants. It remained embedded within a wider context of immigration governance and social inequality in the UK, which has both invisibilised migrant homelessness as a crisis and hypervisibilised migrants as undeserving, suspicious or 'illegal' subjects. In this article, we explore life-story narratives co-produced with migrants across three urban contexts that capture their experiences of homelessness before and during the pandemic. In doing so, we introduce the notion of cultivated invisibility, referring to a habitual, deeply-ingrained mode of practice through which migrants respond to and navigate their experiences of being read as 'Other', in racialised or classed terms. It is developed through conditions of material scarcity and in the course of multiple engagements with racial capitalism's various 'faces of the state' in an increasingly hostile environment for migrants. Cultivated invisibility involves staying on the move and blending into the crowd or avoiding it altogether but it also includes the experience of being unseen despite having come forward for help. Importantly, we demonstrate that cultivated invisibility becomes a cause of illegalisation, just as much as a response to it.
RESUMEN
The current pandemic of SARS-COV 2 infection (Covid-19) is challenging health systems and communities worldwide. At the individual level, the main biological system involved in Covid-19 is the respiratory system. Respiratory complications range from mild flu-like illness symptoms to a fatal respiratory distress syndrome or a severe and fulminant pneumonia. Critically, the presence of a pre-existing cardiovascular disease or its risk factors, such as hypertension or type II diabetes mellitus, increases the chance of having severe complications (including death) if infected by the virus. In addition, the infection can worsen an existing cardiovascular disease or precipitate new ones. This paper presents a contemporary review of cardiovascular complications of Covid-19. It also specifically examines the impact of the disease on those already vulnerable and on the poorly resourced health systems of Africa as well as the potential broader consequences on the socio-economic health of this region.