Miriam Orcutt1, Parth Patel2, Rachel Burns2, Lucinda Hiam3, Rob Aldridge2, Delan Devakumar3, Bernadette Kumar4, Paul Spiegel5, Ibrahim Abubakar3. 1. Institute for Global Health, University College London, London WC1N 1EH, UK. Electronic address: m.orcutt@ucl.ac.uk. 2. Centre for Public Health Data Science, Institute of Health Informatics, University College London, London WC1N 1EH, UK. 3. Institute for Global Health, University College London, London WC1N 1EH, UK. 4. Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway. 5. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Lancet Migration calls for migrants and refugees to be urgently included in responses to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Many of these populations live, travel, and work in conditions where physical distancing and recommended hygiene measures are impossible because of poor living conditions and great economic precarity. This global public health emergency highlights the exclusion and multiple barriers to health care that are faced by migrants and refugees, among whom COVID-19 threatens to have rapid and devastating effects. From an enlightened self-interest perspective, measures to control the outbreak of COVID-19 will only be successful if all populations are included in the national and international responses. Moreover, excluding migrants and refugees contradicts the commitment to leave no one behind and the ethics of justice that underpin public health. Principles of solidarity, human rights, and equity must be central to the COVID-19 response; otherwise the world risks leaving behind those who are most marginalised. Join our global call to action for the inclusion of migrants and refugees in the COVID-19 response (panel
).Urgent universal and equitable access to health systems, preparedness, and responseAccess should exist for migrant and refugee populations, regardless of age, gender, or migration status, including the immediate suspension of laws and prohibitive fees that limit access to health-care services and economic support programmes.Inclusion of migrant and refugee populations in health protection responsesImmediate responses should include the transfer of people held in overcrowded reception, transit, and detention facilities to safer living conditions; suspension of deportations and upholding the principle of non-refoulement; and urgent relocation of and family reunification for unaccompanied minors.Responsible, transparent, and migrant-inclusive public information strategiesStrategies should include regular, accurate, and linguistically and culturally appropriate public communication and information sharing, alongside community mobilisation. Confronting racism and prejudice with a zero-tolerance approach should be at the core of government and societal action.This online publication has been corrected. The corrected version first appeared at thelancet.com on April 27, 2020
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