On March 13, in announcing that Europe had become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, World Health Organization's Executive Director Dr Michael Ryan made a plea in favor of invisible populations. "We cannot forget migrants, we cannot forget undocumented workers, we cannot forget prisoners," he argued.
In just a few days, civil societies around the world were discovering that the problem of invisibility is indeed a recurrent companion to the virus. Exceptionally hard to contain due to its asymptomatic contagion and long incubation period, COVID-19 has also been hard to classify as a cause of death, complicating the efforts to trace it and count its victims. Despite narratives about its alleged democratic character, the virus seems to hit the weak, invisible populations the hardest.
The elderly confined in care homes are decimated across Europe, largely uncounted. From China to Pennsylvania the toll of people who have passed away in the solitude of their own homes – or of their shelters – does not appear in official statistics. Undocumented migrants are dying from the virus because they are too afraid to seek help, and their numbers typically do not reach official statistics. If today "being counted" is even more than ever a precondition for existence and care, western countries are failing to account for the health conditions of invisible populations like people on the move. In the days of COVID-19 as never before, what these dramatic (missing) numbers make apparent is that invisibility may mean death.
