The COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting and exacerbating already existing gender and economic inequalities caused by a patriarchal and capitalist system. For this reason, an analytical framework is essential that allows progress in analyzes that take into account those factors that are working synergistically: the care crisis with the health crisis and poverty. In this sense, it is proposed to place the ecofeminist model of sustainability of life in the debate. Relevant model for the interpretation of the causes of pandemics and how to overcome them (Pérez Orozco, 2014). Understanding, in an interrelated way, that the health crisis is linked to the care crisis and to other factors that have to do with poverty and inequality, allows us to incorporate the concept of syndemic into our analyzes (Singer 2009; Horton 2020) as a a way of capturing the coincidence of a care crisis, a health crisis and an environmental crisis: a concept that tells us about the convergence of risks, the simultaneity of threats, and the unequal socioeconomic impacts on the population, for which reason have intensified or generated new contexts of social vulnerability.
As some initial studies have shown, COVID-19 is first and foremost a question of social class. The second wave -or tsunami- that devastates Europe shows a scenario in which the main risk factor, after age, for suffering from a severe form of the disease is being poor. In fact, the greater the socioeconomic deprivation, the greater the cumulative incidence of the pathology caused by SARS-CoV-2. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures have increased the volume of unpaid care and domestic work falling on families at a time when they have fewer resources and even more limited access to services. As a result, groups that are already excluded face higher levels of inequality.
These inequalities are also intersectional constructs that cross people’s lives, their social practices, and their institutions, affecting access to rights and opportunities. In other words: class, gender, generation, ethnic group, nationality, migratory status (among other variables) intersect and configure the impact of any state measure implemented in a generalized way in the entire population. The impact according to the gender of the people, then, is evident, and will come in the form of different conciliation conditions, distribution of household tasks and care tasks.