Overseas Network, April 5th. A new report released on the 4th local time in the United States reveals the devastating toll of the new crown epidemic on the poor and low-income people in the United States. The report concluded that while the new coronavirus did not dislike the poor and the rich, the U.S. government and society did so deliberately.
As the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 approaches the horrific milestone of 1 million, combined with USA TODAY and The Guardian, the COVID-19 Report for the Poor reveals The number of deaths in different counties during the outbreak in the country is clearly disproportionate. The report was prepared in collaboration with a group of economists from the United Nations led by American Poor’s Advocate and Professor Jeffrey Sachs. The project team collected data from more than 3,200 U.S. counties to compare mortality rates in the poorest 10 percent of counties with those in the richest 10 percent. Based on an analysis of data from these U.S. counties, the study found that the overall death rate in poor counties was nearly double that of rich counties. The
report noted that the death rate gap between rich and poor counties became more pronounced during the deadliest surge in cases. During the third wave of the U.S. epidemic, the poorest counties had 4.5 times the death rate than the richest counties; during the most recent wave, the difference in mortality was almost three times as high. A factor strongly related to the above differences may be that the proportion of the population without health insurance in the poorest counties is twice as high as in the richest counties. The report’s most striking finding is that across the top 300 counties with the highest death rates, an average of 45 percent of the population in each county lives below the poverty line. The county with the highest death rate is Galax County, Virginia, where almost half of the population lives below the poverty line. The county’s death rate during the pandemic reached a staggering 1,134 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 299 for the nation as a whole. In addition, racial factors also contributed to the widening differences in mortality rates among different counties. Among the counties with extremely high poverty and death rates, the Bronx, New York City, is 56 percent Hispanic and 29 percent black, the report noted. More than half of the local urban population lives below the poverty line, with a mortality rate of 538 deaths per 100,000 people, which is within the top 10% of counties with the highest COVID-19 mortality rates in the United States. When it was learned that the black group had a higher death rate, the white group’s fear of the virus subsided, while becoming less sympathetic to the vulnerable group. The
report criticized that while the virus did not differentiate between rich and poor, the US government and society did. William Barber, director of the poor advocacy group, pointed out that the survey results revealed that the US government and society ignored, sometimes deliberately decided not to focus on the poor; he criticized the government “ignoring the poor and low-income people in this country during the epidemic. , is so immoral, appalling and utterly unjust.” Sachs said the findings underscore that the outbreak is not only a nationalTragedy is a failure of social justice. “The burden of the pandemic is being borne disproportionately by America’s poor, women and people of color. Some of them are on the front lines saving lives, but also suffering from sickness and death.”