Alongside coronavirus another contagion is spreading, more familiar but no less infectious: that of class tension. For rich and poor are experiencing this disease in very different ways, creating and intensifying social divisions that are likely to persist long after the scourge itself has gone.

Ben Macintyre www.thetimes.co.uk 

Across the world there is a growing perception that the virus was initially spread by wealthy holidaymakers but is having a disproportionate impact on those with low incomes; that people on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder are suffering more while the wealthy ride it out in better health and greater comfort; that those fighting the disease on the front line are among the most badly paid in society.

In short, the economically disadvantaged and ethnic minorities are doing the most dangerous work, getting ill and dying faster than the rich, white and privileged.

Covid-19 is prompting an upsurge of old-fashioned class conflict but with good reason: this is an inequitable disease, socially, economically and racially discriminatory, and getting more unequal with every day it continues.

Daren Bland, the IT consultant from East Sussex identified as Britain’s “patient zero”, is believed to have picked up the virus in the Austrian town of Ischgl, known as “the Ibiza of the Alps”, a place frequented by celebrities including Paris Hilton and Robbie Williams. Hundreds of skiing holidaymakers were infected in Ischgl and then took the virus back to their home countries; the town’s authorities face legal action for failing to shut down sooner.

In a similar way the disease was carried by members of the Mexican elite from the mountains of Colorado. Every year some 500 well-heeled Mexicans like to gather for two weeks in the expensive ski resort of Vail. What made this year’s trip different was that Vail was a Covid incubator and at least 50 of them were found to have contracted coronavirus when they returned home, including the head of the Mexican stock exchange and the CEO of the company that makes Jose Cuervo tequila.

In Australia, newspapers have blamed wealthy holidaymakers for bringing back the disease. “Some of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs are coronavirus hotspots,” Mail Online reported, “after residents brought the virus back on first-class flights, luxury cruises and [from] a skiing trip to Aspen.” This is the language of class war, but medicalised.

The skiers had no idea they had — or might be spreading — the disease, let alone any premonition of the pandemic about to engulf the world. But there is a belief in many parts of the world that the super-rich are also super-spreaders, and that those with the time, leisure and resources to travel by plane or cruise ship are primarily responsible for its transmission.

The media has naturally focused on the rich and famous who have caught the disease: Prince Charles, Boris Johnson, Tom Hanks, Idris Elba and Sophie Trudeau, wife of the Canadian prime minister, to name a few. From there, it is a short step to blaming coronavirus on the rich.

As The Wall Street Journal reported: “The high-profile cases have stoked class tensions and fed the perception that Covid-19 is a rich people’s problem, especially in countries with high levels of economic inequality.”

In Uruguay and Argentina the virus is known as la peste de los chetos, the plague of the snobs. In Africa some government officials have tested positive after enjoying the sort of holiday in Europe that are far beyond the reach of most Africans.

“Well-off travellers to the rest of the world returned from holidays and business trips carrying the virus, as did infected tourists,” wrote the Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik.

One Twitter post, said to have been written by an Indian doctor, concludes: “A disease spread by the rich as they flew around the globe will now kill millions of the poor.”

Where the disease came from is one source of social tension; where it is going is another, and even more virulent. Across the globe, those with the resources to do so are protecting themselves against infection by retreating to their second homes, isolating in comfort and investing in private medical defences. We may all be in this together but in markedly different ways. In rural Britain the signs instructing second-home owners to stay away are proliferating. This is an entirely reasonable scientific stance as the disease is still largely urban, but also an expression of the age-old division between town and country, a modern take on the ancient myth (with its roots in the Black Death) of diseased city-dwellers polluting pristine rural idylls.

The crassness with which the wealthy have advertised the comparative pleasantness of their lockdowns would be astonishing were it not so predicable. Tweeting from his $590 million superyacht, the billionaire business magnate David Geffen offered this solace to the world: “Sunset, last night . . . isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus . . . I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.”

The Beckhams have been criticised for celebrating their “selfie-isolation” in the Cotswolds on social media. “Showing off your beautiful country mansion and telling us all what a wonderful time you’re having is just rubbing our noses in it,” one local councillor said.

In France, fraternité is being severely strained by lack of égalité during the national lockdown. The French novelist Leïla Slimani, author of The Perfect Nanny, compared herself to Sleeping Beauty in a newspaper diary describing her bucolic country retreat. As a result, she was likened to Marie Antoinette, entirely “out of touch with the fear and anguish of the people”.

Historians of the future may well cite Gal Gadot’s toe-curling video compilation of celebrities singing Imagine in their luxury homes as the ultimate evidence of social disconnect during the era of social distancing.

One fifth of Paris headed for the country as the lockdown came into force. The population of exclusive Southampton on Long Island has doubled since the virus struck. Cornish residents have reported hundreds of holiday lets and second-home owners as people sneaked there for the Easter weekend. Wealthy Americans are snapping up so-called concierge doctors, private physicians offering swift testing, immediate check-ups and call-out services. Some rich Russians have built their own private clinics, while snapping up scarce medical equipment.

For scapegoats, the media have turned on footballers and rich businessmen taking government loans and bailouts while sitting on their own fortunes. Some of the super-rich, such as the Twitter chief executive, Jack Dorsey, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates, have thrown their money at the disease, but most have not. As Emily Maitlis pointed out on Newsnight last week: “The disease is not a great leveller, the consequences of which everyone — rich or poor — suffers the same.” Workers on the front line and exposed daily to the virus, she pointed out, were “disproportionately the lowest paid members of our workforce”.

The world’s social and economic disparities have become magnified in the crisis.

People living in cramped and overcrowded conditions are more likely to contract the virus and, because those at the lower end of the economic scale also tend to be the most unhealthy, to die of it. Diabetes, heart disease, asthma, obesity — all the conditions underlying Covid deaths — are more prevalent in disadvantaged communities.

A study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that people in the most deprived areas of Britain were 1.7 times more likely to be treated in hospital than those in wealthier areas.

The growing class divisions are even affecting international politics. Russia’s cyberwarriors have seen an opportunity to exploit the health crisis, with fresh waves of disinformation. A report by the European External Action Service, which tracks Russian operations, claims that Kremlin-controlled bots on social media are pushing a “mix of conspiracy theories, false news and [the] exploitation of racial, ethnic and even class tensions to sow discord”.

In some countries, the class conflicts exposed by the disease are reinforced by race. A recent survey found that 35 per cent of people critically ill with the virus in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were black, Asian or another ethnic minority, despite making up only 14 per cent of the wider society.

In America the coronavirus is disproportionately infecting and killing African-Americans across the South, where black Americans are more likely to live in poverty and suffer from chronic disease. In Louisiana, for example, black people make up 33 per cent of the population, but 70 per cent of the coronavirus deaths.

Pandemic illness and class have always intertwined, exacerbating divisions and feeding friction. Cholera in the 19th century was seen as a disease of the poor, infecting the working classes living in cramped and insanitary conditions, but often sparing the middle classes. Conspiracy theories about cholera’s origins provoked working-class riots.

In this pandemic, as in earlier plagues, there is well-founded suspicion that some wealthier citizens are making their own “variable interpretations” of the rules, and escaping the worst, because they can afford to.

Like a virus, class conflict lurks in the bloodstream of every society, erupting unpredictably, and sometimes violently. It cannot be cured but it can be treated: with tolerance, generosity, and an appreciation that some parts of society will be experiencing this crisis with far more pain, fear and tragedy than others.

“What’s wonderful” about Covid-19, said Madonna, lying in a milky bath strewn with rose petals in the cringe-inducing Gal Gadot video, “is that it’s made us all equal in many ways”.

No it hasn’t.

The virus may not discriminate, but people do, and coronavirus is revealing just how unequal, as a society, we really are.