FACT CHECK: Is poverty deadlier than Coronavirus?
Conclusion: True. It’s not even close
By California Globe, May 5, 2020 11:15 am
Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.
About a week ago, California Globe launched a marketing effort in which anyone could request a free bumper sticker. The sticker reads “Poverty is deadlier than Coronavirus.”
Happily, the offer has generated thousands of replies, comments and requests. That was predictable. The topic is surely on everyone’s mind as the unprecedented health challenges and economic challenges affect every single American household.
Although it’s pretty clear where we stand from our publication’s general pro-business, pro-growth point of view, we certainly acknowledge that there are reasonable arguments on all sides of this question.
Many have made the defensible point that even those who care primarily about the economy should favor a longer lockdown. Returning to work before it is healthy will ultimately do greater damage to our economy, goes the theory. We don’t agree. We believe that the shutdown never should have taken place, and that the modeling vastly overstated the risks to our health and all but ignored the risks to our economy, but fair enough.
What we didn’t anticipate, however, is that people would actually argue about the lethality of poverty versus coronavirus. On this, there really isn’t room for reasonable debate.
The Facts
According to the World Health Organization, poverty-related diseases, also known as “diseases of poverty,” kill “approximately 14 million people annually.”
According to Our World in Data, worldwide deaths from Covid-19 as of May 4 have totaled 246,999.
According to a report by Oxfam titled “Dignity Not Destitution,” somewhere “between six and eight percent of the global population could be forced into poverty as governments shut down entire economies to manage the spread of the virus. This could set back the fight against poverty by a decade, and as much as 30 years in some regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa. This could mean that more than half of the global population could be living in poverty in the aftermath of this pandemic.”
It’s not the role of California Globe to surmise whose lives are most valuable. However, it’s worth noting that the vast majority – in the high 90th percentile — of Coronavirus related deaths have occurred among those with co-morbidities, with a median death age of about 81. Poverty-related deaths, including hunger, afflict much younger people who might otherwise lead healthy, long lives.
The world has passed peak Corona deaths in every country that’s been hit hard. Even assuming we are only halfway through at 246,000, the total will be less than half a million deaths in 2020. With 14 million dying annually from poverty each year, poverty is 28 times deadlier. And with the economic shutdown expected to force 6-8% more of the world into poverty, that 14 million figure will surely increase.
Therefore, the statement “poverty is deadlier than coronavirus” is accurate and factual.
Many commenters on our Facebook page have expressed the view that conservatives only express concern about poverty when it serves their broader political aims. California Globe is not conservative or liberal. We have excellent journalists whose personal points of view reflect a broad spectrum, and the news coverage should attempt to be neutral whatever their private views. However, it’s simply untrue to suggest in the case of this publication that it is newly or self-interestedly concerned with poverty.
Our editor has been covering the tragic and dangerous explosion of the homeless population as aggressively as any reporter in the state. We have run multiple stories on the crisis of affordable housing, as well. While our editors might propose solutions other than those suggested by progressive critics, the Globe is not a Johnny-come-lately to these issues.
One commenter on our Facebook page pointed out the invalidity of California Globe based on the fact that its owners live in New Jersey. One can only hope the great journalists at the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post or a thousand other American publications are exempt from this ludicrous standard.
In fact, California Globe’s full-time journalists are of course full-time Californians. And at a time when the New York Times reports that “36,000 workers at news companies in the U.S. have been laid off, furloughed or had their pay reduced,” Sea of Reeds Media has not laid off or reduced the salary of a single journalist, despite having to make painful cuts elsewhere in our business. So there.
The bottom line
Poverty is deadlier than coronavirus. That doesn’t mean either is a desirable condition. The smartest plan is to avoid both. But with one threat killing many millions around the globe and growing, and the other seemingly having reached its peak and proving far less fatal than frightening first reports, the path forward is clear. It’s time to get back to work.
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Great article. Love this website , and have been recommending it to others.
I would like a bumper sticker?
You hit the nail on the head.
One of the few true reporters out there. Thank you so much for what you do. I would love to get a bumper sticker, how do we get one.
Hello Cathy. Thank you for reading California Globe. Please visit our Facebook page, then to the Bumper Sticker post to get a FREE sticker. Just direct message us your address. Here is the link.
https://business.facebook.com/thecaliforniaglobe/photos/a.538042007150681/541021303519418/?type=3&theater
Thank you again.
Sooooo………how do we get a bumper sticker?
Here is my own opinion:
GLOBAL OUTCOMES OF MORALLY CHALLENGED SCIENTISTS AND DODGY DATA
British scientist Neil Ferguson ignited the world’s drastic response to the novel Wuhan Corona-19 virus when he published the bombshell report predicting 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million Brits would be killed. Ferguson’s report from Imperial College, which the White House and other officials took seriously, said that if the U.S. and U.K. did not shut down for 18 months, and isolation measures were not taken, “we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months.” His “models” showed overflowing hospitals and ICU beds. Both the U.S. and U.K. governments effectively shut down their citizens cultures and economies.
After Ferguson presented his original doomsday scenario and called for a shelter in place, social distancing model he arranged to have a “bootie call” with another man’s wife after he was diagnosed with Covid-19, thus exposing the woman, her husband and children to the virus. Her husband later became Covid-19 positive.
Ferguson’s modeling programming has since been thrown out, being described by experts as “…seriously flawed.” Ferguson is now recanting his doomsday scenarios.
Ferguson’s scientific failure and moral hypocrisy is truly stunning.
We now seem to have similar modeling problems with the “projections” in our country of fearful outcomes that we are following today resulting in the complete shut down of the entire society and economy that is causing massive damage to our economic and social structures.
I recently saw a report on the meat, dairy and agricultural industries pouring milk into the sewer, having to slaughter and bury chickens, pigs and cattle because none of the meat processing plants are open due to the shutdown. We are now seeing the numbers for suicide, DUI’s, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment, homelessness, poverty and so many other indicators of social and economic collapse increase dramatically. Farmers are now ploughing under their crops as well, due to the severe restrictions from the Corona Virus Shut Down.
After reading in the Los Angeles Times an article claiming that Santa Clara Medical Center was an “Epicenter of Covid-19..”, a few members of our group The Committee to Reopen Santa Cruz to Save Lives went over to the Medical Center to check it out. We found the Covid-19 tents empty with no patients. We talked to the Medical Staff there and they said that the disease and death rate was no higher than normal and that they had only tested 10 people for Covid-19 the previous day.
Medical Doctors in hospitals and Morticians at Funeral Facilities are now coming forward and claiming that death records are being fraudulently recorded as Covid-19 when it is obvious the patient died from other non-covid-19 causes. Hospitals are paid an extra $13.000.00 for every death recorded as “Covid-19”
I think that it is time to realize that we have been deceived by flawed computer modeling and morally challenged scientists. We must look at the real data which we now have and admit that what we are looking at is nothing more than a seasonal flu and not a world wide pandemic that is threatening the lives of billions of people.
Now it is time to reopen our society, restart our economy and stop this madness.
https://bolenreport.com/dr-judy-mikovits-the-bravest-woman-in-science/
PLANDEMICS MOVIE – https://plandemicmovie.com/
Can I get another sticker someone removed mine
It is neither poverty nor coronavirus that inflicts ill health. No one has ever even isolated and observed a coronavirus in an electron microscope (source: Dr. Joachim Mutter).. Does it even exist? Or is it produced inside the human body? Science does not know. Big Pharma wants us to believe it is a plague that is dangerous and comes from evil China. What we do know is that those with compromised immune systems from taking drugs, anti-depressants, diabetes, and other bad habits and cultural behaviors, tend to be more susceptible to what is called virus. But it isn’t virus that kills the person who contracts the disease. It is the body’s own immune system that triggers a cytokine storm resulting in inflammation and pneumonia; or in the case of coronavirus an oxygen deficit in the lung. I wrote an article posted on California Globe explaining that in LA County almost all of the coronavirus cases were of elderly in nursing homes and foreign born persons coincidentally living in low income areas but also some middle class persons living in the suburbs (Armenians who were foreign born). The foreign born are carriers of dormant tuberculosis and TB is never cured. These dormant carriers spread it to their families in intimate environments (shared bathrooms). Those with dormant TB are more susceptible to what is called virus and their immune systems are compromised. TB doesn’t come from poverty only but lack of clean water, clean food, etc. in other countries that is transported here. If vaccinations work then why did England suffer smallpox deaths way after 98% of its population was vaccinated against it? In the Philippines where 100% vaccinated against smallpox the risk of death from smallpox was 5 times greater for those vaccinated than non-Philippinos not vaccinated.
I would like a sticker please.
Did you get your sticker?