On April 4, Licho, the last speaker of Sare, a tongue that once was a part of the Great Andamanese language family, died of tuberculosis and heart disease in Port Blair, South Andaman Island.
Of the wider Great Andamanese language family, only three speakers now remain, according to linguistics professor Anvita Abbi, who worked with Ms Licho for two decades. All three are more than 50 years old and suffer from a variety of ailments.
Ms Licho herself did not live to see her 60th birthday, and while her death has not been specifically linked to Covid-19, the first cases of the coronavirus have started appearing in the archipelago, whose top half is controlled by Myanmar and the bottom by India. And it is putting an entire ethnographic group at imminent risk of extinction.
While the world is focused on the ravages of Covid-19 - lives lost in nursing homes, bailouts of giant corporations, stock market stirrings and new ways of work and play brought on by the pandemic - some of the segments most at risk are the "little people" like Ms Licho, whose story was told in an April 20 blog by Prof Abbi in Scientific American.
THE FORGOTTEN FOLK
Across the Andaman Sea in southern Thailand, to northern Malaysia and on to Papua, Indonesia, and arcing back from Alice Springs in Australia, are thousands of the most vulnerable people who live on the margins of urban society if not its consciousness.
Malaysia's Orang Asli, for instance, are a byword for under-nourishment. Their life expectancy at birth is about two decades less than the national average of 76.
With a reported poverty rate of 30 per cent compared with a national average of 0.4 per cent, the group, which numbers about 200,000 and whose lineage dates to the earliest human settlers in Peninsular Malaysia, is most at risk. Already, several Malaysian Orang Asli have been infected by the coronavirus.
North along the Isthmus of Kra and into Thailand's southernmost tip and upward into provinces such as Trang and Satun, it doesn't get any better for either the Orang Asli or other ethnic communities such as the Maniq, who are the only Thais of proto-Negroid stock. Until recently, the Thai Orang Asli, who number fewer than 1,000, even had difficulty accessing healthcare because they did not have Thai identity cards. Many depend on barter trade; honey and tongkat ali herbs exchanged for food and clothes.
And yet, even in indigent circumstances, they bear a sophisticated world view and live with a sense of pride - nothing is ever taken for free.
For centuries, people like the Andamanese, the Orang Asli and the 300 or so indigenous tribes of Papua lived a life sheltered from the viruses of the outer world, a lot of which were introduced into their communities by colonial invasion, security needs or encroachment in the name of development - roads built through Jarawa territory in the Andamans, huge dams in Pahang, Muslim insurgents in southern Thailand.
Whether it is the tribal folk of South-east Asia or the aborigines of Australia, a good fifth of them still live in extremely remote areas. There is abundant evidence that they are more vulnerable to hardship than those in mainstream society. Lung, kidney and some other diseases are more common among them and tend to show up earlier. Oral cancer is an issue, especially where tobacco chewing or smoking is endemic.
Today, it is time to make sure that their dignity, livelihoods and health - indeed, their very existence itself - are preserved, never mind how pressing the other demands of our times are. Papua, home to four million people, reportedly has just five hospitals designated to handle Covid-19 cases and between them have a mere 60 ventilators.
"There is growing evidence that deforestation and biodiversity loss lead to the emergence of new diseases. And the world's top scientists have already recognised that indigenous peoples and local communities are the best guardians of the world's tropical forests and biodiversity," Ms Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, who is a Filipina of Igorot ethnicity, wrote recently.
"As stewards of our forests, we play a critical role in preventing the emergence of diseases like avian flu, Ebola, Zika, and Covid-19."
THE URBAN POOR
While the dwindling Andamanese tribes and the Orang Asli of South-east Asia are emblematic of the little people who need the most protection in a health-cum-economic crisis of this dimension, they are also a metaphor for other marginalised folk. Such people are everywhere - the odd-job workers in Jakarta, the push-cart vendors of Luzon in the Philippines, the migrant labour in Mumbai suddenly told to trudge hundreds of miles to their home village in central India amid a national lockdown.
Health issues aside - public health facilities are parlous in the Philippines, India and Indonesia - how these people are helped to navigate what the distinguished Nigerian writer Reuben Abati calls "an epidemic of empty pockets" will determine how we are to be judged as nations and civilisations.
Take Thailand's US$60 billion (S$84.6 billion) tourism sector, which underpins South-east Asia's No. 2 economy and is crowned by a national capital that is the most-visited city in the region. Its now unemployed street vendors and tuk-tuk drivers - the equivalent is the Bajaj driver in Jakarta already disrupted by ride-hailing apps like Gojek - are among the worst affected. Don't forget, this comes on top of last year's drought - the worst in four decades - that hit the families of many of these people in the hinterland.
"A substantially larger percentage of people in lower-income groups have manual roles, such as construction (10 per cent in Thailand; 11.5 per cent in EU-27) or machine-based jobs, which means they can't work remotely and are without any income," a University College London (UCL) real-time paper, which used Thailand as a case study, reported this week.
"Without adequate government intervention to support income or employment for the poor, the adverse impact of Covid-19 could worsen income inequality."
The UCL study found that low-income workers, such as farmers and construction or factory workers, tend to work in jobs that require less physical proximity to other people at work than high-income workers, such as office workers or school teachers. They also are less flexible to work remotely because they tend to be in occupations that are more machine-dependent and less ICT-enabled.
The findings have useful insights for policymakers and leaders seeking to ease the lockdown and fight the pandemic at the same time.
The imperative of putting these groups back into the workplace without jeopardising their health is perhaps the first challenge, and nowhere is its magnitude greater than in India, which has doubled the lockdown period initially contemplated. The nation's informal sector of daily-wage earners and contract labour who are hired on word of mouth and get no paid leave constitute an estimated 93 per cent of the 540 million workforce.
Even Chinese poor are feeling the distress; for migrant workers who still had jobs, the average monthly salary reportedly dropped nearly 8 per cent in March to about US$525.
An article from the China Finance 40 Forum, a group of prominent economists and financial leaders, suggested the government should give three-month cash subsidies to households who have been unable to resume work due to the virus, the subsidy calculated on the number of the elderly and children in the household.
To be sure, governments are doing what they can, but the crisis hit at a time when economies from China to Thailand and India had all significantly slowed, adding to existing misery and crimping the muscle power of many.
In Thailand, a Social Security Fund has been announced that gives people in informal employment 5,000 baht (S$220) a month for three months. But to be eligible, you need to apply over the Internet and with a bank account number. But, guess what, some of the poorest do not have either or both!
In India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully drove a policy to make banking available to the bottom of the pyramid, the government has handed out the equivalent of S$20 each to more than 350 million people, on top of food aid to 53 million and one refill of a gas cylinder to each of 10 million families.
In months to come, after the initial rally-round-the-flag reactions that boosted their popularity, leaders will be measured with more dispassionate eyes on how they responded to this crisis. If the big relief packages that have been rolled out are seen to have benefited the privileged more than the truly needy - think Khazanah-backed companies versus Felda settlers in Malaysia, to cite but one example - there could be untold consequences.
From the hungry to the angry is not a long journey.
