Alexandra township in Johannesburg, South Africa, has a protracted history of conflict and contestation over service delivery. The township is 6.91 km² with a population density of 25 979 persons per square km and is adjacent to one of the wealthiest suburbs in South Africa. This disparity reflects the glaring inequality that has come to characterise the country. During the first years of COVID-19 and lockdown regulations (2020-2021), the community of Alexandra experienced multiple struggles including high levels of job loss and unemployment, limited or no access to services and high levels of food insecurity. COVID-19 public health safety measures like social distancing and regular hand washing were not physically possible. Yet residents were victims of extreme state brutality when the police and army enforced lockdown measures. Nested in a larger study that examined community experiences of COVID-19 in four sites in South Africa, I focus on ward 75 in Alexandra to explore township life during the pandemic. I draw on qualitative data collected in 2021 to understand how the community navigated unemployment, economic precarity, food insecurity and service delivery in this township during the pandemic. I reflect on the inherent contradictions when public health measures that seek to protect citizens exacerbate existing structural and social inequalities and expose the fault lines of deeply unequal contexts. I attend to how dominant global scientific evidence and public health policies are anxiously applied to local contexts and devalue knowledge, experience and intuition about local contexts.