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      Global call to action for inclusion of migrants and refugees in the COVID-19 response

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          Abstract

          Lancet Migration 1 calls for migrants and refugees to be urgently included in responses to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. 2 Many of these populations live, travel, and work in conditions where physical distancing and recommended hygiene measures are impossible because of poor living conditions 3 and great economic precarity. This global public health emergency highlights the exclusion and multiple barriers to health care 4 that are faced by migrants and refugees, among whom COVID-19 threatens to have rapid and devastating effects. 5 From an enlightened self-interest perspective, measures to control the outbreak of COVID-19 will only be successful if all populations are included in the national and international responses. Moreover, excluding migrants and refugees contradicts the commitment to leave no one behind and the ethics of justice that underpin public health. Principles of solidarity, human rights, and equity must be central to the COVID-19 response; otherwise the world risks leaving behind those who are most marginalised. Join our global call to action for the inclusion of migrants and refugees in the COVID-19 response (panel ). Panel Lancet Migration's immediate actions urged in response to COVID-19 Urgent universal and equitable access to health systems, preparedness, and response Access should exist for migrant and refugee populations, regardless of age, gender, or migration status, including the immediate suspension of laws and prohibitive fees that limit access to health-care services and economic support programmes. Inclusion of migrant and refugee populations in health protection responses Immediate responses should include the transfer of people held in overcrowded reception, transit, and detention facilities to safer living conditions; suspension of deportations and upholding the principle of non-refoulement; and urgent relocation of and family reunification for unaccompanied minors. Responsible, transparent, and migrant-inclusive public information strategies Strategies should include regular, accurate, and linguistically and culturally appropriate public communication and information sharing, alongside community mobilisation. Confronting racism and prejudice with a zero-tolerance approach should be at the core of government and societal action.

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          Most cited references4

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          The UCL–Lancet Commission on Migration and Health: the health of a world on the move

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            COVID-19 in humanitarian settings and lessons learned from past epidemics

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              Lancet Migration: global collaboration to advance migration health

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Lancet
                Lancet
                Lancet (London, England)
                Elsevier Ltd.
                0140-6736
                1474-547X
                23 April 2020
                23 April 2020
                Affiliations
                [a ]Centre for Public Health Data Science, Institute of Health Informatics, University College London, London WC1N 1EH, UK
                [b ]Institute for Global Health, University College London, London WC1N 1EH, UK
                [c ]Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway
                [d ]Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, Baltimore, MD, USA
                Article
                S0140-6736(20)30971-5
                10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30971-5
                7180034
                32334651
                f1509c05-0e93-4daa-a2c3-bbdf9ea7a1ed
                © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

                Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

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                Medicine
                Medicine

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