No.The pandemic is not the only one capable of devastating so many lives. There is another fearsome virus: that of inequality. The photograph of the world recorded by Oxfam in the report entitled “The pandemic of inequality“, Published on the occasion of the opening of the works of the World Economic Forum in Davos, reveals a dramatic reality.
Oxfam: pandemic increases inequalities
The pandemic has increased poverty around the world. And, today, there are, 163 million more people who are estimated to live on less than $ 5.50 a day compared to the pre-pandemic period.
Every 4 seconds 1 person dies from lack of access to care, for the impacts of the climate crisis, for hunger, for gender violence.
World Bank projections show that unless action is taken to reduce income inequalities within countries, poverty levels will not return to pre-crisis levels even by 2030.
Women devastatedly affected
Women are those who have suffered the hardest economic impacts of the pandemic. Overall they lost $ 800 billion in revenues in 2020 and are facing a significant increase in unpaid care work, which still falls mainly on them today. And so, while male employment is showing signs of recovery, it is estimated that in 2021 there will be 13 million fewer women employed than in 2019.
Ethnic minorities have a much better chance of dying
The pandemic has also hit ethnic minorities very hard. During the second pandemic wave in Britain, for example, people of Bangladeshi descent they were five times more likely to die from Covid-19 than the white British population.
While the monopolies held by Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna they created five new billionaires during the pandemic and enabled their companies to earn over $ 1,000 per second. But less than 1% of their vaccines have reached people in low-income countries.
Oxfam: 10 have wealth greater than 3 billion people
In the first 21 months of the pandemic the 10 richest men in the world they have more than doubled their assets in real terms.
And, to date, they have 6 times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion people in the world, that is 40% of the world population.
And even if the value of their fortunes dropped by 99.993%, they would still be richer than any citizen placed among the poorest 99% of the world’s population.
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