By examining the global public good nature of pandemic preparedness we can identify key social justice issues that need to be confronted to increase citizens' voluntary compliance with prevention and mitigation measures. As people tend to cooperate on a voluntary basis only with systems they consider fair, it becomes difficult to ensure compliance with public health measures in a context of extreme inequality. Among the major inequalities that need to be addressed we can find major differences in the extensiveness and intensiveness of quarantine experiences, lack of opportunities to participate in common efforts, hardship in complying with disease control recommendations, and an unfair distribution of the cooperative surplus.
Keywords: COVID-19; communicable diseases; healthcare system resilience; public goods; social justice.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.