This paper explores how risk communication during health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, is not sensitive to the social determinants of health and consequently exacerbates inequity among the poor, especially poor urban women who subjected to otherness and gendered risk. Using qualitative methods, I conducted interviews and observations with 15 women living in an informal settlement and low-rent vertical public housing in Jakarta. Employing feminist standpoint theory, I examine the risk information seeking and processing of poor urban women through an intersectionality lens. The study found that 1) the dominant risk communication approach that focuses on behaviour change largely ignores the social determinants of health, which for poor urban women needs to be prioritised in order to survive; and 2) the oversight of the social determinants of health has resulted in othering and deepening of gendered risk that further marginalises poor urban women from risk mitigation or disease prevention.