What we got wrong about COVID-19 and refugees

For the world’s 26 million refugees, the health impacts of COVID-19 have not been its most lethal effects.The coronavirus has not yet decimated refugee camps or killed displaced people in significant numbers, as I and many others feared in March. While this figure is likely lower than the actual number due to weak testing capacity, even if it was tenfold higher, the spread of the virus in the US and many European nations still overshadow it.Despite this, the pandemic is a much harder blow economically to the world’s 80 million displaced people than for those in affluent societies. Here are three things we got wrong about the coronavirus pandemic, and how they will shape humanitarian work in the year ahead.COVID-19 has not ravaged refugee campsWhen the pandemic began to grip the world in March, disastrous consequences were predicted for overcrowded displacement camps in places such as Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Greece.