Steps you can take today to make a difference in the fight against COVID-19

Steps you can take today to make a difference in the fight against COVID-19.

As COVID-19 continues to affect communities across the world, it can feel very overwhelming and scary. But there are ways we can help slow the spread and cope with this global pandemic together. No one individual, community, or country can deal with this challenge alone. We must work together, in our communities and across borders, with dignity and compassion.

Here are a few ways you can help

Take care of yourself: Stay healthy, stay active, stay calm, and remember to keep washing those hands. Treat yourself to a nice hand moisturiser too!

Take care of others: Stay home to help flatten the curve and give our healthcare workers the very best chance we can to handle this crisis. Check in on neighbours, friends, and family. Make video calls. Pick up the phone and call a friend instead of texting. Ask the people around how you can help. Stay connected with and mindful of the people you love.

Support small businesses, responsibly: Get takeout or delivery from your favourite local restaurants (if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, you can buy gift cards from them online). Support local shops and businesses when you can. And remember to keep your donations safe for when our network of shops reopens – your pre-loved items are a lifeline and we will need them more than ever.

Donate to organisations helping people most affected by COVID-19: We’re on the ground responding to COVID-19 in over 65 countries, delivering life-saving clean water, soap, and sanitation services like toilets to some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. We’re most concerned about those without access to health and hygiene infrastructure, like the almost one million Rohingya refugees living in the world’s largest refugee settlement in the world. Donate today to ensure we can continue to support families at risk in Bangladesh and beyond.

Push for policies that will help us beat this together: The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic could push half a billion more people into poverty – setting the fight against poverty back by up to 30 years in some parts of the world, including Africa.
 
As governments take necessary steps to manage the spread of the virus, entire economies are being shut down – this is already having a devastating impact on the world’s poorest people who are most likely to be in informal employment, without labour protections such as sick pay or the ability to work from home.

Economic stimulus packages must support ordinary workers and small businesses, and bailouts for big corporations must be conditional on action to build fairer, more sustainable economies.

An ‘Emergency Rescue Package for All’ would enable poor countries to provide cash grants to people who have lost their income and to bail out vulnerable small businesses.

Read our recent report Dignity Not Destitution: An Economic Rescue Package for All and find out how world leaders can support poor countries and poor communities during this global crisis.

This disease knows no borders and does not discriminate. For the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, the worst is yet to come as the coronavirus begins to establish itself and spread quickly through communities powerless to stop it, without access to water, sanitation or healthcare.
Together, we can save lives.