Debate on Disaster Response Feasibility: Poverty and Inequality as Sources of Community Fragility during Covid 19 Lockdown in Zimbabwe

Infectious disease outbreaks are not a new phenomenon in the world today, with the Spanish flu of 1918, the Asian flu, Ebola and Zika virus outbreaks affecting most regions of the world. Covid-19 with its similar characteristics to its predecessors is not an exceptional. The study seeks to examine how urban communities responded to the Covid-19 outbreak in the Zimbabwean urban spaces. Deploying an ethnographic survey within the qualitative research design and guided by Godden’s theory of structuration and agency, the paper argues that due to the existing level of fragility characterised by high poverty levels, the lockdown measures exposed feeble ways of handling disasters by local and central governments. The lockdown brought residents to scenarios in which they scrambled for resources at communal points daily exposing themselves to infections and conflict with law enforcement agents. The paper argues that with the dominance of the informal economy, lockdown measures brought to the fore the complexities of trying to irk some livelihoods in difficulty circumstances. Thus the conclusion of the study is that extreme Covid 19 lockdown measures for the Zimbabwean urban communities were unbearable as they worsened the level of fragility hence it became a ‘disaster within a disaster’. Keywords: Coronavirus 19, Fragility, Feasibility, Disaster, Pandemic, Lockdown