LONDON – Officials say the mortality rate among poorer people with the coronavirus is twice that of the richest in Britain.
The Office for National Statistics studied 20,283 deaths between March 1 and April 17. It says the mortality rate in the poorer areas was 55.1 deaths per 100,000 people compared to 25.3 deaths per 100,000 in the richer areas.
Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, said “these areas also suffer from poor housing, nutrition and higher incidence of health conditions that might act to lower immunity.”
Helen Barnard, acting director of anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, says poorer people are less likely to have jobs where they can work from home. She says, “this means they may have to face a very significant drop in income or keep going to work, facing greater risks of catching the virus.”
Just as the tories intended.
“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
No surprises there. In addition to the reasons mentioned in the article there are several more possible:
“The poor” are more likely to have work that puts them in close quarters or puts them in contact with many more people (cleaning, for example), The poor may hold more than one job - increasing the number of different contacts they have during the day, the poor don’t have enough cash on hand to wait 3 weeks between tips to the grocery store. Their living situation can change fairly frequently putting them in contact with more people than those of us who are sheltering long term with the same people.
And…their employers just think they’re disposable (think Tyson and Amazon) and need to be publicly shamed into safety protocols.
During my tenure as a poor person, I came to believe that where minorities are a higher percentage of the population, discrimination against the poor is more prevalent and comes in uglier forms.
Makes you wonder…do the poor even exist…? They are God damn near invisible save when people demagogue them for political purposes.
Remember that the Good Book say we’ll always have them with us… as the lower classes who grease the wheels of unbridled capitalism. (Jaysus knew about this sh*t even before he audited those classes at Wharton School of Business.)
You’ll be able to tell I don’t get out much but that giant dildo in the picture of London’s skyline looks kind of cool even if it is a salute to phallic looking bullets or bullet looking phallus (phalli?).