COVID-19 pandemic might force 150 million people into extreme poverty: World Bank

The World Bank has revealed that due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as many as 88 million to 150 million people around the world will likely be forced into extreme poverty by 2021. The World Bank made the shocking revelation on Wednesday, October 7 when it releases its biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report.

Middle-income countries will be severely affected

As per a PTI report, the World Bank also stated that the post-COVID economy will be very different and countries will have to be prepared for drastic changes like allowing resources, capital and labour to move towards different sectors. The exact figure of the people that will be forced into extreme poverty will depend on the severity of economic contraction.

World Bank Group President stated that “The pandemic and global recession may cause over 1.4 per cent of the world’s population to fall into extreme poverty”.

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The World Bank report claimed that the worst affected will be the countries that already have alarming levels of poverty and that 82 per cent of the total people that will slip into extreme poverty will be from middle-income countries. The report also spoke about the success story of Mumbai’s Dharavi, and one of India’s largest urban settlements was able to effectively tackle the COVID-19 pandemic through a combination of mobilising community members and staff from private medical clinics for a strategy based on mass screening for fever and oxygen levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic which saw its first outbreak in a wet market in Wuhan, China last year has now spread all across the world. The virus, named COVID-19 by the World Health Organisation, has infected over 35 million people worldwide with the global death toll crossing 1,000,000. The US has reported more than 7.5 million positive COVID-19 cases and a death toll of over 210,000.

(With PTI inputs, Image: investopedia.com)

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