Having lived through a parent being suddenly broke and on welfare, I know that it is far easier to regain financial sustainability than it is to be actually resurrected.
These half measured lockdowns could be just delaying the inevitable and in fact making things worse by devastating economies and giving the virus more time to mutate.
While every single life is precious, it is not a certainty that this virus warrants such a response.
We might not have any ammunition left for much worse to come.
Cure worse than the disease? 30 MILLION face starvation as Covid-19 economic shutdown hurts most vulnerable, UN food chief warns
There is a grave danger that many more people will die from the broader economic and social consequences of Covid-19 than from the virus itself, especially in Africa. And the last thing we need is to have the cure be worse than the disease itself.
Beasley isn’t the first UN official to raise alarm over the consequences of lockdowns and other Covid-19 measures. In July, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore said that
“the repercussions of the pandemic are causing more harm to children than the disease itself.” A study published in The Lancet found that the impact of lockdowns and other pandemic mitigation measures could lead to 10,000 additional deaths among children each month.
The WFP chief grabbed headlines in August after he declared that the world is facing a famine of
“biblical proportions,” predicting that hunger will likely affect those who didn’t experience it before.
In many nations around the globe, COVID-19 restrictions are crippling economies and forcing many into joblessness. In the Philippines, the rates of hunger are unprecedented, and food charities are struggling to keep up (
AFP, December 9, 2020). A director of one food charity observed, “If you go out there everybody will tell you that they’re more afraid of dying from hunger than dying from COVID. They don’t care about COVID anymore.”
According to one source, nearly a third of Philippine families ran short on food in the past three months, and 2.2 million
families are currently experiencing “severe hunger.” Dreams of moving out of poverty have been shattered, and some compare the current state of existence to “living like pigs.”
While our world has been focused on the health aspects of COVID-19, hunger is the silent killer ravaging communities in the farthest corners of the globe. We don’t see these victims on the nightly news. We don’t keep a real-time tally of the lives lost. But this doesn’t make these mothers and fathers and children any less important, and it doesn’t minimize the grief of their families.
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