According to a report in the New York Times, the World Food Program is warning that 130 million people face starvation because the “national lockdowns and social distancing measures are drying up work and incomes” and may lead to a devastating disruption of “agricultural production and supply routes.” As the article points out, this problem is compounded by the looting and social destabilization that has taken hold in countries across the globe.
Here at home, massive crowds of people have been forced to wait in lines at food banks that sometimes stretch literally for miles. As 22 million people and counting have been left jobless, and countless business owners stand on the brink, or have already crossed over the brink, of losing everything they worked for, localities are seeing a dramatic rise in suicides, and history tells us there will likely be many thousands more. Add those to the spike in drug overdoses that inevitably accompany even slight increases in the unemployment rate — let alone a 15 percent increase in the span of a few weeks — along with the rises in domestic violence and homelessness, and it’s not hard to see that our strategy to “save lives” may kill many more people than it saves.
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