COVID-19 has highlighted the critical role of adequate investments in the public health systems and comprehensive social protection programmes. Many South Africans suffer from a poor quality of life. The COVID-19 pandemic worsened the crisis, increased by the weak and poorly implemented social protection programs offered by the government. Hence, the central contention here was that poor health and income is disproportionately borne by the poor in South Africa and that such income related health inequalities appear to have become substantially more pronounced in the COVID-19 era relative to the pre-COVID-19 period. Despite the existence of the hypothesis of inverse relationship between the injection of the South Africa Social Security Grant (SASSG) on poverty status and income-related health inequality in some instances, we dwelled on the positive relationship between these variables. Therefore, we hypothesized that the economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 disproportionately affects the South African poor.