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Abstract

Pandemic management strategies often reinforce the trope of the uncooperative and disease-spreading poor; they who are to be blamed for transmission and therefore must be subdued to protect the population. Although counternarratives to this proposition seek to explain from the lens of political economy why people who are poor behave the way they do, they do not, at the bottom, assail the central idea that the poor behave in ways inconsistent with the aims of public health. The interrogation of this central idea is what this research aims to contribute towards using original data from interviews with 21 COVID-19 survivors in the urban poor areas in the Philippines. This research captures experiences in the stigma of COVID-positive individuals during the early stages of the virus in May-June 2020, and investigates how these experiences might impact views on the duty of the infected to voluntarily disclose their infection status. It finds that despite painful stigmatizing experiences both within their communities and in interactions with actors in the public health care system, an overwhelming majority of participants still felt that they had a duty to voluntarily disclose their COVID-positive status to protect their community—offering another possible critique to mainstream narratives that blame the poor for pandemics and other crises.

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