"Foregrounding these historical and global dimensions helps make clear that the enormous scale of the current crisis is not simply a question of viral and a lack of to a . The ways that most people across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia will experience the coming pandemic is a direct consequence of a global economy systemically structured around the exploitation of the resources and peoples of the South. In this sense, the pandemic is very much a social and human-made disaster — not simply a calamity arising from natural or biological causes. [...] The Middle East, for example, is the site of the largest since the Second World War, with massive numbers of refugees and internally displaced people as a result of the ongoing wars in countries such as Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq. Most of these people live in or overcrowded urban spaces, and often lack the rudimentary typically associated with citizenship. The widespread prevalence of and other diseases (such as the reappearance of cholera in Yemen) make these displaced communities particularly susceptible to the virus itself. [...] One microcosm of this can be seen in the Gaza Strip, where over 70 percent of the population are refugees living in one of the most densely packed areas in the world. [...] Under blockade and closure for most of the past decade, Gaza has been shut to the world long before the current pandemic. The region could be the proverbial canary in the COVID-19 coalmine — foreshadowing the future path of the infection among refugee communities across the Middle East and elsewhere."